Welcome to Giving Helpful Feedback. In this video, we explore the negativity bias in more depth, how long its effects last, its emotional impacts, and what it takes to overcome the impacts of negative feedback. Let's start by examining how long the negativity bias lasts. A while ago, a very interesting study was conducted comparing three groups of respondents. Researchers interviewed lottery winners, people who had been paralyzed in an accident, and people who had not experienced any major life event. All of the winning and accidents had occurred about a year before the interview. The results were intriguing. Lottery winners didn't report any greater happiness than the other two groups. It was as if any initial euphoria went away after time. They were as happy as they had been before the lottery win. Accident victims reacted differently. They were significantly less happy than the people in control group with no major life events. They thought a lot about life before the event, a kind of nostalgia effect. They remained less happy a year later. Thus the findings of this intriguing study was that misfortune tends to linger longer, and when something fabulous happens to you, the original elation tends to wear off more quickly. Of course, you could say that these two events are really apples and oranges. Of course if you are paralyzed the effects will impact you more. But the same effect is seen in other studies as well. For example, in one study subjects are asked to record their daily life in diaries. They record all manner of good events and bad over a series of weeks. Subjects are also asked to report their mood after each day. The basic question is whether the happiness of a good event or the anguish of a bad event spreads to the next day. By now you may be beginning to guess. The finding? After a good day, people did not see any increase in well being the next day. But after a day with bad events, people had a decrease in their sense of well being the next day. In other words, the impact of the bad events lingered. What does this mean for us? When managers give negative feedback, there's a good chance that the feedback will be considered a negative event. The impact of the negative event will linger and impact the work lives of employees into the next day, perhaps longer. Now let's consider how a negative event impacts people. Let's first look at research from education where teachers are evaluating students. Here we see that bad feedback has a stronger impact on student perception of their performance than good feedback. And perhaps just as importantly, bad feedback was seen as a better marker of how teachers really felt about student performance. In other words, students will listen very carefully to a teacher's negative feedback because that is considered to be the most truthful or real. Taking this finding to the working world, we can expect that negative feedback will have a greater impact on employees than positive and that negative feedback will be seen as more accurate indicator about a manager's true feelings about the subordinate’s performance. Not only is negative feedback taken more seriously, but negative information is processed more thoroughly then good and it's more memorable too. Cognitive psychologists ask subject to recognize positive and negative items to which they had previously been exposed. Not only was recognition better for negative items, but people remembered the source of the negative information better. So people also remember negative information more clearly, and they remember where they heard it. You may have the sense that good reputations in the world of work are hard to gain, but can be lost in a minute. Well, studies bear your gut feeling out. It turns out the bad reputations are easy to get, but very difficult to lose. Let's say you're a doctor, and you make a poor medical choice. Your reputation is hurt, even if you made thousands of good choices from that moment on. Conversely, good reputations are difficult to get, but easy to lose. Take a teacher. They make many good choices, and after a decade perceived are as seasoned and trustworthy. However, if they make one poor choice, their reputation is gone overnight. Once again, the research bears this out. So the impact of negative information is varied. Negative information is seen as more accurate measure of someone's opinion of you. Negative information is more memorable and people remember who gave them the negative information more than they remember the details of positive information. Finally, our gut feelings about reputations turn out to be true. You can build up a reputation over a lifetime of good deeds, but a single action can change people's opinion of you overnight. The impacts of negative feedback are so varied and so pervasive, you may be wondering, why give it at all? How can you possibly be successful giving negative feedback? Well, for one thing, you can deliver negative feedback successfully. Don't forget Elton Simmons, the traffic cop. His superb social skills won over the hearts of even the most angry speeders. For another, people are known to have what is called the over-confidence phenomenon, meaning we consistently overestimate our own capabilities. For example, in driving, this over-confidence serves as a kind of buffer against negative feedback. And finally, there are the amazing findings from marital researchers that shed light on this dilemma. Let's now go to the marital research labs of Dr. Gottman. Dr. Gottman runs the marital research lab and is famous for his ability to watch a couple talk and then predict whether or not they will divorce. In one such study he was able to predict up to 94 percent of the couples that would end up divorcing. Needless to say, Dr. Gottman isn't invited to too many dinner parties. But what is interesting for us is what he found out about the impact of negative feedback on marital relationships. What do you think will have a bigger impact on your relationship with your spouse? Number one, increasing the number of positive comments such as, honey, you look so nice today. Or decreasing the number of negative comments such as, honey, you forgot to take out the garbage again, would you please do that? Increasing positive feedback will not impact relationship satisfaction as much as decreasing negative feedback. In other words, telling your partner that they are great a hundred times a day is not going to do as much good as stopping your comments about how much weight they need to lose. Negative comments are bad for a relationship, but interestingly Gottman has some advice for all of us. If you're going to tell your partner that they need to be more helpful, then you better give them five compliments for each criticism. This is the famous 5:1 ratio and in a little while we are going to return to it. Have you had enough yet? Are you convinced that negative feedback is taken more seriously than positive? If so, you'll want to consider carefully before using it. Hopefully you are convinced and now we can turn to positive feedback and some of its benefits. This is Tracy Jennings and thank you for watching Giving Helpful Feedback. [MUSIC]
