Bad distorts your judgment, but it can also sharpen your wits. As we’ll see in this chapter and the next, the power of bad can spur students, help adults flourish, and promote the noblest of causes. To use its force, you first need to understand the impact of criticism—the pain it causes as well as the benefits it provides—and a good place to start is with Stephen Potter.
Potter was a British humorist with a keen appreciation for the negativity effect long before psychologists came up with the term. He realized how useful it could be—and didn’t pretend to harness it for any noble cause. Potter’s books were compilations of sly social gambits designed to “make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly.” His 1947 bestseller, Gamesmanship, introduced a term that he defined as “the art of winning games without actually cheating.” He later broadened the concept to the rest of life and added another word to the language, one-upmanship, a strategy enabling the ignorant and unskilled to prevail against their superiors.
Suppose you’re at a dinner party being dominated by a cosmopolite expounding on his recent travels. Whatever he’s talking about—Chinese politics, the Congo rain forest, Peruvian cuisine—you can throw him off his stride without knowing a thing about the place. Any generalization he makes about any country can be countered with a single sentence uttered with serene authority: “Yes, but not in the south.”
Potter viewed criticism as an opportunity for one-upmanship as long as it was delivered deftly, in a pseudofriendly fashion. The essence of reviewmanship, as he called his technique of writing book reviews, is “to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn’t, you are glad that someone has, although obviously it might have been done better.” Again, no expertise is required. You don’t need to know a thing about botany, for example, to review Dr. Preissberger’s Rhododendron Hunting in the Himalaya. You don’t even need to read the book. Randomly pick a name cited in a footnote and lament that the author doesn’t give credit in the main text “to that impeccable scholar, P. Kalamesa” (whoever that is). Or find the Latin name of a plant not in the book’s index and ruefully note, “Dr. Preissberger leaves the problem of Rhododendron campanulatum entirely unanswered.”
We don’t recommend this approach to criticism—and definitely not to anyone reviewing this book. But we do admire Potter’s insights. He understood the effects of mixing praise and blame better than most parents and executives today. It took researchers a while to appreciate his theory of literary one-upmanship, but eventually it was tested in some clever experiments, like the one in which people were shown a positive book review:
In 128 inspired pages, Alvin Harter, with his first work of fiction, shows himself to be an extremely capable young American author. A Longer Dawn is a novella—a prose poem, if you will—of tremendous impact. It deals with elemental things: life, love and death, and does so with such great intensity that it achieves new heights of superior writing on every page.
How intelligent does the critic seem to you? How likable? Now consider this review:
In 128 uninspired pages, Alvin Harter, with his first work of fiction, shows himself to be an extremely incapable young American author. A Longer Dawn is a novella—a prose poem, if you will—of negligible impact. It deals with elemental things: life, love and death, but does so with such little intensity that it achieves new depths of inferior writing on every page.
The syntax and analysis in each review are identical, but replacing each positive word with its opposite does wonders for the critic’s reputation. In the experiment, people who saw the negative version of the review rated the critic as significantly more intelligent than did the people who read the positive version. The naysayer got lower ratings for kindness, fairness, and likability, but he was rated higher for literary expertise. Teresa Amabile, the psychologist who did the experiment, also tested this effect by using two reviews that had been published in the New York Times Book Review—one a rave, the other a pan. Both were written by the same critic, but Amabile disguised that by changing the bylines when she asked people to rate the author of each review. Sure enough, the author of the scathing review seemed smarter than the author of the rave, even though it was actually the same person. Amabile concluded that when you’re trying to make an impression, you often face the choice of seeming “plodding but kind” or “brilliant but cruel.”
What you choose is strongly influenced by the situation, as Amabile demonstrated in another study. Each person in the experiment was put in front of an audience and asked to evaluate someone else’s work. If this critic believed herself to be higher in status than the audience and was feeling intellectually secure, then she was often charitable in her evaluation. But if she was feeling intellectually insecure and lower in status than the audience, then she was much more likely to go negative. She would try to raise her status by employing the brilliant-but-cruel strategy. Being caustic wouldn’t win her friends, but it could earn her respect even if the criticism was unfair. It’s the sort of upmanship practiced by Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, when she meets a social superior, the wealthy aristocrat Mr. Darcy. She immediately starts mocking him behind his back. Eventually, after realizing her injustice to him, she confesses to her sister why she did it.
“I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason,” she explains. “It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”
To seem brilliant yet not cruel, you can try tempering the criticism with kindness, or at least the faux kindness taught by Potter. One of his favorite ploys was to preface a negative comment with “I’m afraid,” as in “I’m afraid that Dr. Preissberger’s prose makes for some rough sledding.” Potter called the strategy I’m Afraidmanship and declared it “admirable for showing that you are a nice man.” Once again, Potter’s wisdom has been confirmed by experimenters, who have their own name for this stratagem: the dispreferred marker. That’s the linguistic term for a phrase like “I’m afraid” because it serves as a signal (a marker) that the sentence includes something negative (dispreferred). We often use these markers at the start of a sentence, as with To be honest or With all due respect or Sad to say. But they can be dropped in anywhere to cushion the blow: “By the 17th rhododendron-hunting trek into the mountains, most readers will be exhausted, but Dr. Preissberger, God bless him, perseveres for another 200 pages.”
To test these phrases, a team of researchers led by the consumer psychologist Ryan Hamilton showed people listings for products from Amazon.com along with a customer’s review that was generally favorable (“This watch took my breath away”) but also included some criticism at the end (“the band can sometimes pinch and rub”). Other people saw a version in which a few extra words—I don’t want to be mean, but—were inserted before the criticism. Those few words made a difference, and so did other dispreferred markers like I’ve got to be honest and Don’t get me wrong. The readers became more eager to buy the watch than if they’d seen the unedited review. They knew the watch wasn’t perfect, but they overlooked its flaws because they found the reviewer more likable and also more credible. When it came time to publish the results in the Journal of Consumer Research, the researchers used the stratagem themselves. They gave the article a proper scholarly subtitle, “The Use of Dispreferred Markers in Word-of-Mouth Communication,” but they prefaced it with “We’ll Be Honest, This Won’t Be the Best Article You’ll Ever Read.”
While being a critic makes you look smarter, what if that’s not your chief objective? What if, unlike Potter, you actually want to offer constructive criticism? That’s a trickier proposition. Delivering criticism or other negative messages can produce lots of positive results, but only if it’s done correctly, and most people don’t know how.
For too long, business executives have been force-feeding their subordinates the “criticism sandwich.” The idea, also called the “feedback sandwich,” was popularized in the 1980s by Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, who advised managers to sandwich any critical remarks between layers of praise. It sounds logical enough, and it makes the annual evaluation less painful for the manager. Giving criticism face-to-face is difficult for most people, so it’s more pleasant to start with the good stuff. The manager goes on at length about the employee’s strengths and achievements before getting to the meat of the criticism. Then she switches back to conclude with a few nice words and end on a happy note—or so it seems to the manager.
But that’s usually not how it feels to the employee. By this time all the opening praise has been forgotten. The employee can’t get the bad stuff out of his mind. He’s choking on the middle of the sandwich. A conversation that was supposed to inspire better work has left him demoralized.
This problem, of course, is not limited to annual evaluations. It’s one of the oldest and most awkward social conundrums: How do you deliver bad news? When Douglas Maynard, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, began systematically analyzing this question, he noted the answers that have evolved in folklore over the centuries. One view is found in a joke about the man who takes care of his sister’s beloved cat while she’s traveling. A week into her trip, he calls her and promptly delivers the bad news: “Your cat is dead.” The sister is devastated and rebukes him for his abruptness. He should have broken it to her gently, she says, suggesting he could have first called to say that the cat was on the roof of the house with no way to get down safely.
“Then we would hang up,” the sister explains, “and you would call a little later and say that the cat had fallen off the roof and was injured. And then you could call again to say the cat had died. That way I could have gotten used to the idea.” Her brother apologizes, and she continues on her trip. A week later she gets another call from him.
“Hello,” he says. “Um, Mom’s up on the roof, and we can’t get her down.”
This joke plays off a common assumption that bad news should be delivered gradually because people aren’t ready to hear it. But do they really want to put it off? Not according to researchers who have tested that old line “I have some good news and some bad news” by asking people which they want to hear first. More than three-quarters of the people want to start with the bad news. It’s only when asked how they’d prefer to deliver mixed news that people say they’d be more comfortable starting with the good news. A manager thinks he’s being kind by starting off with heaps of praise, but he’s doing it more for his own benefit. Most employees would rather first get the bad stuff out of the way.
In fact, the opening praise can make the subsequent criticism even more painful, as Baumeister found in a joint study with the clinical psychologist Kenneth Cairns. In the study, college students took a personality test and then were given feedback that was supposedly generated by a computer analysis of their personality. (The feedback actually had nothing to with the students’ responses, but that white lie induced them to pay more attention to it.) The computer flashed a list of adjectives that supposedly fit the student’s personality, and afterward the student was asked to write down as many as he or she could remember.
Some of the students saw a list containing mainly positive adjectives like confident and honest along with just a few negative words like spiteful or greedy; others saw a list of mainly negative words. No matter which list they saw, the words of praise didn’t make much impact, because the students recalled fewer than half of the positive adjectives. The criticism had more impact, but not in every situation. When the students saw a list of mainly negative adjectives, they forgot most of those words, too.
It was only when they got the equivalent of a criticism sandwich—a list of mainly positive adjectives that included just a few negative ones—that the bad stuff became truly memorable. Most of those isolated zingers stayed in their memories. The explanation for this became clear when the researchers analyzed the different ways that criticism was processed. Based on the prior psychological tests, they knew some of the students were already experts at denial. They met the definition of a repressor, meaning someone who tends to ward off or deny anything bad. (Clinical psychologists consider repressors especially difficult to work with, because they won’t admit they need any help, and managers may find them to be difficult employees, too.) In the experiment, the repressors were quite adept at ignoring a litany of criticism. When they saw the list of mainly negative adjectives, they zipped through them, quickly tapping the keyboard to move from one word to another, and afterward they were less likely than the other students to remember the barbs. No surprise there—that’s what repressors do.
But a remarkable reversal occurred when the repressors were shown the mainly positive list. They relaxed their defenses, spending more time to enjoy each bit of praise—and then were staggered when an adjective like hostile or deceitful appeared. Afterward, they were even more likely than the other students to recall each of those flaws. As expert as the repressors were at dodging bad news, they turned out to be especially vulnerable to the criticism sandwich. And even though the rest of the students—the nonrepressors—weren’t hit quite as hard, they, too, remembered those isolated bits of criticism better than any other words in the experiment. The experiment’s results jibed with Thomas Jefferson’s observation: “I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”
For praise or other good news to make a lasting impact, the brain must transfer it from the short-term working memory into long-term memory. This process gets disrupted when the good news is followed by something negative. The brain uses so much energy to focus on the new threat that the previous pleasantness gets lost because of an effect called retroactive interference. Just how it’s lost is a subject of debate among researchers; some think it’s actually erased from memory, while others believe it’s still there but difficult to retrieve because of competition from the new negative information. Either way, it explains why people often can’t recall what they were doing just before something bad happened. It’s why so many employees walk out of meetings obsessing about the one or two bits of criticism they got instead of all the praise that preceded it. The criticism sandwich may be logical, but the brain doesn’t logically process threatening information. The power of bad can short-circuit the ability to remember good. When you have something painful to say, you need to take the negativity effect into account—and then put it to work for you.
To deliver criticism or bad news, first know your audience. That may seem like an obvious first step, but it’s routinely skipped, and not just by the managers who have been feeding everyone the same criticism sandwich. Doctors ought to be the world’s foremost experts at delivering bad news—they do it all day long—yet too many of them haven’t mastered this basic step. There’s a vast medical literature on how to break bad news to patients, but much of it presumes that doctors should set the agenda. They’re supposedly so knowledgeable and powerful that they can plan in advance exactly how to structure the conversation and control their patients’ reactions.
But when the sociologist Douglas Maynard studied these conversations, he found that the doctors with the best bedside manners didn’t set the agenda or follow any script. Instead, they took their cues from the patient. These doctors made sure to deliver the news in person, not by phone or email, so they could observe the patient’s reactions and adjust accordingly. They’d frequently start off by asking the patient how he was feeling. Then they would seek the patient’s perspective by asking a question like “What have you learned so far?” or “What do you think is going on?” If the doctor had a written report with test results, she might let the patient read it and then ask, “What do you think this means?”
Asking questions allows the patient to be more than a passive audience. The first impulse when gobsmacked with bad news is self-protection: the fight-or-flight response. Some patients try to shut out the news; others want to shoot the messenger, or at least argue with her. But if the patient is instead asked his perspective and is the first one to say that something’s wrong, then he’s readier to face it and continue the conversation.
Once he acknowledges that there’s a problem, the doctor can confirm his observation and explain why he’s right. Maynard calls this the “perspective display sequence,” a three-step process in which the doctor first seeks the patient’s perspective, then confirms it, then delivers the details of the bad news. Instead of being the hated bearer of ill tidings, the doctor becomes someone who agrees with the patient and wants to work together to deal with the problem. Of course, it doesn’t always work this way. When asked for their perspective, typically a third of patients will deflect the question and say something like “You’re the doctor. You tell me.” But even then, the patient feels like more of a partner, and the doctor has gained a better sense of how the patient wants to deal with the news.
As the doctor proceeds with her explanation, she can keep watching the patient and asking questions, taking care not to go too fast. After delivering bad news, there’s a temptation to rush ahead to something less painful, like offering encouragement or focusing on the logistics of handling the problem. But the best way to follow bad news is to shut up. A pause gives the patient a chance to absorb the blow, and it allows the doctor to gauge the patient’s reaction. If the patient is speechless, the doctor can gently coax a reaction—“I know this must be hard”—and ask questions like “What worries you the most about this?” Instead of proceeding with more explanations and plans, the doctor needs to figure out what the patient needs next.
The same guiding principle applies to delivering any kind of bad news or criticism. Here are some strategies:
Consider your objective. Do you simply want to help someone cope emotionally with unpleasant facts, or are you trying to spur them to change? In either case, the person will feel better if there’s some good news along with the bad, but the sequence depends on your goal. In a study of sequencing strategies, the psychologists Angela Legg and Kate Sweeny administered a personality questionnaire to people who were then given feedback (bogus, as usual) about their traits. When the people heard first about their bad traits and then their good ones, they ended the experiment in a better mood, but they were also less inclined to do work to correct their bad qualities. The ones who heard the bad traits last were more worried but also more eager for self-improvement. It’s not easy to motivate without demoralizing, but you can compromise by concentrating on the good feedback toward the end while also finishing up with a clear reminder of what’s wrong and how to fix it.
Ask questions. They’re useful whether you’re critiquing a romantic partner, a friend, a student, or a colleague at work. If you’re doing a formal evaluation of an employee, don’t automatically serve the criticism sandwich or any other dish. A better culinary metaphor would be to offer a menu.
You can start off with a quick welcome, letting the employee know that he has done some good things and you’re looking forward to even better work the next year. A little positive reinforcement makes people more receptive to subsequent negative feedback, researchers have found, and you don’t want him sitting there wondering if this meeting is going to end with him being fired. But then see how he wants to proceed. Offer him a menu of the topics to be covered: his strong points as well as the not-so-strong points and the ways to improve. As we mentioned earlier, most people prefer to get the bad stuff out of the way first, but if this employee isn’t one of them, proceed with some praise. Just don’t go on too long, and don’t assume he’ll remember it. You’ll have to repeat it later, because it will register only after you’ve gotten through the bad stuff.
You can ease into the criticism with the sort of question used by doctors delivering bad news: “How do you think things are going?” If there’s a written record to consider—productivity or sales figures, a list of projects completed—you could ask the employee to look at it and offer his judgment. Some employees (like those repressors studied by Baumeister) will refuse to identify any weakness, forcing you to reveal to them that they’re not perfect. But most will probably recognize some area for improvement, and there’s your opening. You can confirm the employee’s judgment and then gently expand the discussion to offer your analysis of his problems. As you offer criticism, be sure to give the employee time to absorb it, and monitor his reactions with more questions like “Is that fair?” or “Does that make sense?”
Once you’ve gotten the criticism across, use the power of bad to your advantage. As soon as the brain receives criticism, it kicks into high gear, alert for information to deal with the threat. Now you can start accentuating the positive, because the good stuff will be encoded in long-term memory—along, of course, with the bad stuff. As usual, it will take a few good things to make up for every bad one, so don’t stint on the compliments. One way to improve the positivity ratio is to focus on future achievements rather than past mistakes. You can point out that the employee missed some deadlines in the past year, but then spend lots more time discussing how to structure the job so that he succeeds in the coming year. If the employee’s personality got him into trouble on team projects in the past year, make plans for more solo projects this year, and praise him as a self-starter who excels when he has the freedom to operate on his own.
In doling out praise, don’t worry that it will seem overblown or insincere. Most of us like to think we see through false flattery, but that’s not what the sociologist Clifford Nass found when he offered it in his lab at Stanford. He programmed a computer to brownnose people playing a game of Twenty Questions. The computer would ostensibly think of an animal, and each player would try to guess it after asking a series of yes-or-no questions. The computer never told the players whether they’d guessed the right animal or not, but it did praise them for asking questions that were “ingenious,” “clever,” and “highly insightful.” Some of the players believed the praise was deserved, because they’d been told that the computer really was evaluating how well they played the game. These players were naturally quite satisfied with their performance. They were also satisfied with the computer, giving it high marks for both likability and accuracy.
Other players, though, were warned at the start of the experiment not to believe the computer. The evaluation software wasn’t yet finished, they were told, so for now the computer was merely offering stock comments that had nothing to do with how well the players performed. The players, who happened to be computer-science students, understood the situation clearly. When asked afterward if they’d paid any attention to the computer’s comments, they all said no. One of them indignantly wrote, “Only an idiot would be influenced by comments that had nothing to do with their real performance.”
Yet the flattery still worked. It bolstered the players’ opinion of their own performance as well as the computer’s. They liked the computer just as much as the players who’d been told the praise was genuine. They even gave the computer equally high marks for accuracy. Although they were consciously aware that the praise was bogus, they unconsciously absorbed the flattery and liked the flatterer. The research convinced Nass that flattery just about always works as long as there’s enough of it.
Be creative with your praise. To counterbalance a few negative comments in a meeting, Nass advised, you should come prepared with a long list of positive comments, ideally ones that are memorable because they’re surprising or clever. Instead of just praising a salesman’s skill, call him “The Closer.” Such flattery might seem gratuitous—or unctuous—when you’re dealing with someone who’s obviously talented and has every reason to be confident. But don’t assume that success offers any protection against criticism. When Ronald Reagan was president, he visited New York one day and was cheered by tens of thousands of people lining the streets as he rode through midtown with Mayor Ed Koch. As they were crossing Forty-Second Street, Reagan looked out the car window and exclaimed, “Look at that guy—he gave me the finger!” Koch couldn’t understand the reaction.
“Mr. President,” he said, “don’t be so upset. Thousands of people are cheering you and one guy is giving you the finger. So what?”
“That’s what Nancy always says,” Reagan replied. “She says I only see the guy with the finger.”
No one is immune to criticism. Lee Daniels has directed an Oscar-winning movie (The Butler) and created a hit TV show (the critically acclaimed Empire), but he still can’t bear reading anything negative about his work. He’ll read a rave review and obsess about the single sentence of criticism. “It’s like taking a knife and stabbing you in the heart over and over,” he says. “So I’ve learned to protect myself by not reading reviews.”
No matter what line of work you’re in, we recommend using Daniels’s strategy: Let someone else read your reviews. (And make sure it’s someone who won’t let that killer sentence get through.) The rise of social media means that just about every business or profession is now fair game for critics. You can’t ignore them altogether, and you shouldn’t—there may well be some useful guidance from customers on Yelp or students on RateMyTeachers. But if you scroll through all the vitriol yourself, you’ll get so obsessed by the nasty insults and cheap shots that you won’t remember anything else.
Better to let someone else read through the reviews, pick out the fair criticism, and then give you a synopsis along with some excerpts—a carefully edited mix of positive and negative comments. Your personal censor should be kind enough to follow up any criticism with lots of praise, but also tough enough to recognize how useful the bad stuff can be. “Criticism,” Winston Churchill observed, “is like pain in the human body. It is not pleasant, but where would the body be without it?”
Like physical pain, criticism is essential because it focuses attention on something that’s gone wrong and is liable to get worse. When delivered properly, with the right mixture of praise, a few negative words are often powerful enough to correct the problem. Sometimes, though, it takes a more potent form of bad.