Welcome back to Giving Helpful Feedback. In this video, we explore the reason why people often, but not always, react badly to negative events, such as negative feedback. In fact, researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, have shown that people usually have one of several reactions to negative feedback. And, the reactions look like this. On the left, we see problem solving and that's great. In the Alton Simmons video, drivers who got the ticket were probably motivated not to get another one. We saw that in our first video on negative feedback. But what often happens in organizations is that instead of problem solving, you get neglect, the tendency to let work go unfinished. For example, not returning emails or missing deadlines. You could also get retaliation, that looks like getting back at the manager, which could be talking behind the manager's back or not delivering information the manager might need, undermining the manager. You also see exits. This is simply leaving the organization, spending time at work looking for a job, quitting, and other things like that. Why are their so many negative reactions on the ride side of the chart and not so many positive reactions? People often react badly to negative feedback. Let's understand why. It turns out people weight negative information more heavily than positive. What does this mean? It means we think more about negative events than positive. Here's an example of where we see this happen over and over again. It's when people make first impressions. Let's say I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine. I give you two pieces of information about her, and here they are. My friend is a dedicated teacher, and she teaches small children. My friend also stole a steak from the food store. What is your first impression of my friend? With few exceptions, negative information receives more processing and contributes more strongly to the final impression than positive information. Our dedicated teacher will find it difficult to avoid negative impressions caused by her steak stealing. This fact about the steaks just sticks in people's minds. When people make this kind of judgement about other people, it's called the positive-negative asymmetry. But we also see that people tend to give more weight to negative events than positive events in a wide variety of situations. Consider, all things being equal, you are more saddened by losing a $50 bill Than you are made happy by gaining a $50 bill. Similarly, you are more unhappy when receiving a bad performance evaluation than you're happy about getting a good one. It's like a weighing scale that permanently gives more weight to negative actions and events. Why do we do this? One explanation is that if our ancestors ignored things like saber tooth tigers and other dangers, they were not likely to survive. If they ignored something good, for example, a banana, or maybe a coconut, it wouldn't make much difference to their survival. So survival depended on our ability to pick out and pay attention to negative and dangerous things. In summary, we've identified the tendency for people to give more weight to negative events than positive events. In our next video, we'll see how this impacts work, especially our duty as managers to provide feedback. This is Tracy Jennings and thanks for watching Giving Helpful Feedback. [MUSIC]