How to Take Feedback

Negative feedback is essential for negotiating life and social relations. Despite the feel-good mantra of current self-improvement manuals, much of our growth and development depends on interactions and other experiences that feel bad. Criticism has a hallowed role in nearly every area of human endeavor.

Learning relies in large part on recognizing (then analyzing and fixing) our mistakes. In schools and universities we pay people to point them out to us. At sporting events, coaches spew diatribes-cum-feedback from the sidelines. Performance reviews are a fact of life in the work world, and spouses regularly conduct their own none-too-flattering reviews of each other. Parenting can likewise become a negative feedback loop. "I hate you" may not be constructive criticism, but it is information nonetheless.

In fact, so much of our learning, loving, and living depends on negative feedback that you'd think people would be good at it by now. Instead, criticism almost always feels clumsy, hostile, and extraordinary, even to the person delivering it. Employees and managers alike say they hate performance reviews. Spouses pay counselors to help them speak difficult truths to each other. Parents stifle disapproval rather than risk displeasing their kids. Friends and lovers go out of their way to avoid "confrontation," which is what negative feedback can too easily become.

"In our society, we're not trained in either giving or getting criticism," says Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford University and a PT blogger. "And we're remarkably incompetent at understanding how we affect other people. Consequently, negative feedback is very, very difficult to do well."

If you've ever deliberately prepared to give someone negative feedback, you've probably run across some familiar nostrums on how to do it skillfully: Make it about the behavior, not the person. Use "I" statements. Soften the language, or add a positive affirmation. So instead of "You're driving me nuts," say "I love you, but I'm becoming increasingly perturbed by the frequency with which you smoke cigars in my presence."

Are any of us really fooled by such sleights of tongue? Probably not. I didn't assassinate my grad student's character when I reviewed the draft of her thesis, and yet she came away mortally offended. People react strongly to criticism no matter how it's delivered. Hearts race, muscles tense, blood pressure rises; the ancient fight-or-flight response kicks in, courtesy of the sympathetic nervous system. It's almost as though our brains are fine-tuned to apprehend negative feedback in any guise.

As it turns out, they may be. There's evidence that separate circuits exist to handle negative information and events and they're more sensitive than the circuits that handle positive phenomena. Evidence for a so-called negativity bias emerged 15 years ago in experiments that showed that people weigh flaws more heavily than attributes when sizing up other people. Similarly, losses tend to loom larger than gains in financial risk-taking behavior. John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has shown that electrical activity in the brain spikes more strongly in response to negative stimuli than to equally potent positive ones. "Most people respond more to the bad than to the good," says Cacioppo.

The negativity bias can seriously skew our interpretation of critical feedback. Shortly after I started a new job, my boss sent me an email expressing displeasure with my performance. I remembered it as a scorching harangue, but when I reread it months later, I was surprised to find that the "harangue" included strong encouragement and complimented my skills. It didn't matter; the message stung, even the second time around.

Our hypersensitivity to criticism may also lead us to see it where none exists. When a friend who teaches kindergarten recently delivered a lesson plan for evaluation, the new principal asked how she thought the plan fit into the school's formal curriculum. The implication, my friend assumed, was that it didn't. She was a confident, experienced teacher, not used to having her methods called into question. When she let that be known, the principal assured her that she wasn't doubting the plan's value; she'd simply needed some help describing it to her supervisors. Cacioppo says our brains seem to be wired to turn neutral phenomena such as a request for more information into either good or bad—usually bad. "We simplify the world by making it bipolar," he observes.