When Feedback Becomes a Verdict
Ambition becomes harder to correct when disappointing results threaten the person we are trying to become.
In a Berkeley experiment, students took a deliberately difficult vocabulary test, received the correct answers, and had an opportunity to study for another. Some also received a message acknowledging that struggling was common and encouraging them to avoid being too hard on themselves. These students spent longer studying than those given no such message. Their subsequent scores, however, did not differ significantly. The encouragement appeared to help them return to the work; an improvement in performance remained unestablished.
[Breines & Chen, 2012]
That modest finding complicates the suspicion that accepting a failure means becoming comfortable with it. A disappointing result creates a practical problem, but it can also become a judgement about the person who produced it. The possibility worth examining is that improvement becomes harder when these two meanings fuse. Information about something we did begins to feel like evidence against someone we hoped to become.
An ambition gives effort direction. It also supplies an imagined future against which the present can look painfully inadequate. Someone trying to become a respected designer has to tolerate producing work that a respected designer would reject. There is no logical contradiction here: learning requires a period of being unable to do the thing being learnt. Emotionally, however, the distance can feel like disqualification.
The trouble with absolute responsibility
James Allen gives this problem unusual force in As a Man Thinketh. He presents achievement and failure as consequences of thought, treats an ideal as something a life gradually becomes, and associates wisdom with composure. His account takes inner life seriously, including the obligation to cultivate character rather than merely accumulate rewards. Yet the claim that all achievement and failure originate in one's thoughts makes circumstances into a moral assessment of their owner.
[Allen, 1903]
Taken literally, that account cannot accommodate someone whose work is interrupted by illness, or whose employer withdraws the resources needed to complete it. Neither event establishes a failure of character. There is also a practical cost to overstating personal control. If every setback demonstrates defective thinking, investigating what happened risks becoming an exercise in self accusation. Responsibility for the next decision gets confused with authorship of everything that preceded it.
Feedback research offers a more limited explanation of how thought matters. Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi's meta-analysis assembled 607 effect sizes and found that feedback improved performance on average, while more than a third of the effects were negative. Their proposed explanation concerned attention: information can direct someone towards the details of a task, or towards what their performance implies about themselves. The latter shift can consume attention needed for correction. Their analyses supported parts of this account, although they could not directly establish the proposed mental processes [Kluger & DeNisi, 1996]
This suggests a reason that demanding accountability and demanding self-condemnation may produce different conversations. A confusing checkout page has features that can be inspected. Asking whether its designer is fundamentally competent opens a much larger dispute, often with little additional information about the page.
The risk is sometimes quite real. A workplace that punishes admitting uncertainty gives people reasons to protect their standing. In a study of 51 teams at a manufacturing company, Amy Edmondson found that feeling safer taking interpersonal risks was associated with more learning behaviour, including discussing errors. The observational design cannot establish causation. It does, however, direct attention towards the conditions under which people disclose mistakes. Someone anticipating humiliation may be reading their surroundings accurately; asking them to become more composed leaves those surroundings unchanged.
[Edmondson, 1999]
Keeping the error specific
The Berkeley experiment offers a small counterweight to that escalation. Students could see their incorrect answers; the compassionate message left those answers intact. It acknowledged the difficulty without turning the result into a flattering account of their ability. The study concerned a brief laboratory task, so it cannot establish what years of this response would accomplish. Its narrower contribution is useful: acknowledging failure without harsh self-judgement was compatible with greater subsequent effort.
[Breines & Chen, 2012]
Consider a designer whose proposed checkout page performs poorly in a usability test. If participants repeatedly miss the payment button, there is a concrete difficulty to examine. The designer's embarrassment adds another problem, especially if the design has already been defended in front of colleagues. Explaining why the participants misunderstood the page might protect a reputation. Moving the button and testing again would put the original judgement at risk while making the work easier to assess.
The distinction is consequential because both responses can involve considerable effort. Someone can produce an elaborate defence of a decision and experience it as rigorous analysis. A useful question is whether the explanation identifies something that could change the next result. If it only establishes why the decision-maker deserves sympathy or admiration, the original problem remains largely untouched.
Composure still needs somewhere to lead
It would be tempting to conclude that the solution is simply to feel less threatened. But emotional relief has its own ambiguities. Reinterpreting a situation can make it easier to bear while leaving a changeable problem in place.
A study by Allison Troy and colleagues illustrates the importance of context. Among people experiencing high levels of recent stress, greater ability to reduce sadness by reinterpreting distressing film clips was associated with fewer depressive symptoms when their stressors were relatively uncontrollable. The association reversed for more controllable stressors. These were associations, not evidence that reframing caused depression or prevented action. They nevertheless challenge the assumption that a capacity to feel better must be beneficial regardless of what the situation requires.
[Troy et al., 2013]
For the designer, treating a disappointing test as survivable leaves room to investigate it. Deciding that users simply dislike innovation could also restore composure, while making another test seem unnecessary. The difference lies in what remains open to examination after the feeling subsides. Calmness alone cannot tell us which response occurred.
Nor does every criticism deserve acceptance. A poorly designed test can mislead, and an employee may have sound reasons to distrust a manager's judgement. Keeping feedback specific includes questioning how it was produced. The aim is to preserve the possibility of correction without granting every adverse opinion authority over the work.
There is something unexpectedly demanding about allowing an error to remain ordinary. It means giving up the consolation that a disappointing result must reveal either exceptional circumstances or a deep personal defect. The designer still has a page to revise, and the revision may fail too. What becomes possible is a second attempt whose purpose does not include settling, once and for all, whether the designer deserves to be there.
References
Allen, J. (1903). As a man thinketh. [Project Gutenberg edition](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4507/pg4507-images.html).
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143. [doi:10.1177/0146167212445599](https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212445599).
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. [doi:10.2307/2666999](https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999).
Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. [doi:10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254](https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254).
Troy, A. S., Shallcross, A. J., & Mauss, I. B. (2013). A person-by-situation approach to emotion regulation: Cognitive reappraisal can either help or hurt, depending on the context. Psychological Science, 24(12), 2505–2514. [doi:10.1177/0956797613496434](https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613496434).
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