Hidden Brain - The Truth About Honesty

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

Think about how often you hold back honest opinions of someone else because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. But there are times when this well-intended restraint can be a mistake. This week, in the second part of our series on failure and feedback, psychologist Taya Cohen helps us understand when — and how — to be honest. If you missed the first part of our series — which focuses on how we can become better at learning from difficult or negative feedback — you can find it here. 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In one of the most famous episodes of the TV show Seinfeld, the character Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, takes to the dance floor. Alright, because dancing! Come on, who's dancing? What follows is hard to describe. Elaine's dancing resembles a giraffe navigating an ice skating rink on roller skates.

Elaine's co-workers watch with Mouts a game as her hands and feet fly off in different directions. Here's the thing though, no one tells her she is a bad dancer. Later behind her back, her friends George and Jerry discuss Elaine's dancing. Have you ever seen Elaine dance? It's more like a full-body dry heave, set the music. Did she do the little kicks and the thumbs? What, you mean you know about this? It's one of those problems I hope would just go away.

There's only one friend who is willing to tell Elaine the truth. Kramer, the character in the show, who often says and does things that are socially inappropriate. When Elaine breaks into her trademark dance moves in front of him, he asks her what she thinks she is doing. Stanthi! No, that ain't dancing, Sally. It ain't fun! Are you stink?

All of us notice things about the people in our lives. We noticed oddities about our friends, co-workers, family members. We see their flaws and foibles. And even though we say we care about them, what do we do? Often nothing. We let them flounder in blissful ignorance. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the difficulty of sharing unpleasant feedback and new psychological insights about how to navigate difficult conversations. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

I'm a good dancer, right? I forgot to make my bed. Many of us have a complicated relationship with honesty. On the one hand, we are taught it's important to tell the truth, always, without exception. On the other hand, we often receive messages about the value of shading or softening the truth so that we don't hurt someone's feelings. These opposing dictates can leave us in a bind. At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologists Teah Cohen studies this tension and what we can do about it.

Teah Cohen, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you. Happy to be here. Teah, I understand that as a child, you once received a gift of a jogging suit from an aunt, and you didn't care very much for this gift. Can you tell me that story? Sure. So this example is from when I was three or four years old. My anpanise gave me a pink jogging suit for Hanukkah or my birthday,

and as a child, maybe less so now, there was no way I was going to wear anything pink. And according to my family, I took one look at it and said, but I hate it. And my mother, of course, was embarrassed, and she apologized. Luckily, I don't think my Anperness, who's now 90 years old, I don't think my amperace, who's now 90 years old. I don't think she was too offended. But the story continues to live on in family lore in nearly 40 years later as this example of my tendency towards honesty.

So of course, lots of children say exactly what's on their minds. But I understand as you went through school, you continued to favor forthrightness as your standard policy. And in middle school, I understand you once gave your mom feedback on something she was wearing. And that incident has also become something of a family story. Can you tell me what happened?

Yes. So I was in seventh or eighth grade. My mom was in the bedroom getting changed. She got with some friends. I was in the hallway outside and I looked at her with some friends. I was in the hallway outside. And I looked at her and I said, you're going out in that. And she was a little taken aback

because she thought she looked good, but she was appreciative and she changed. And she told me later she recalled thinking that, wow, this is the beginning of the teenage years. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Would you say that your family valued such honesty, or was it frowned upon here? Definitely valued. It's say my family is more direct and honest than many.

There's nothing that was off limits in terms of what we could talk about. So after you grew up and entered the workplace as a junior professor, you and other young scholars got advice on how to conduct yourselves in meetings with senior colleagues. What kind of advice did you get? So, I've heard this advice where sometimes people tell junior employees or new faculty to stay silent, not say too much in meetings, things along those lines. So, to keep your head down, basically. Yeah, protect yourself.

You don't want to say the wrong thing and upset someone else who's might be more powerful or higher in status, so better to just not express your opinions or preferences. Now, did you follow this advice to you? No, I don't think I did. Release not generally. And that I, if I had opinions or preferences, I would try and communicate them,

you know, do so in a way that was diplomatic. But I don't think I held back so much of conveying my interest or preferences when I had them. Hmm. What about your peers, your junior faculty peers? Were they more circumspect in meetings? There were certainly some examples I can think of, you know, from the past, where I observed colleagues staying silent or maybe communicating indirectly about what they wanted

and it was really hard to figure out what their true preferences were for the different group decisions that we were making. In other words, they wouldn't speak up in meetings or they would be elliptical in what they said. Yeah, both. Either not speaking up or not communicating very clearly about what their true preferences or priorities or underlying interests were. So if we're talking about who is going to teach

which courses or serve on different committees, things along these lines, you know, we're trying to figure out what each person preferred to do, you know, why, what was important to them, and it could be really frustrating if we couldn't figure that out. Now, it's possible that of course that your colleagues didn't have strong preferences about what they actually wanted. That's true. I think in some cases people did, and it would come out later after the fact if they weren't happy with the group decision

or that the group didn't fully take into consideration their interests and what they wanted. And then I could see that if members of the group stayed silent about it and only after the fact it would come out that they were not happy with the decisions. So as you went on in your career, one of your chief professional affiliations was with a group called the International Association for Conflict Management. And at some point after joining the Board of the Organization, you heard from an academic colleague who was frustrated by the way the organization operated. What did your colleague tell you and how did you try and fix the problem? So this was an experience where we were planning for our annual conference. So in this organization, there's a conference every summer and in the spring, different

decisions are made about which papers to accept. And people in the organization need to know whether the paper has been accepted so they can start making travel arrangements. And this conference is held in all different locations across the world. So travel can be extensive. And so in this one situation, I was talking to a colleague who was frustrated because they wanted to know whether their paper was accepted,

so they could make travel plans. And I was on the board of the organization at that time. I wasn't directly involved in all the conference planning, but I said, I'll send an email, I'll find out what's going on, kind of motivate the conference chair to make faster decisions, communicate that out, because I agreed with her that it was late for these decisions to be coming out. So I went back to my office, I sent this email to the program chair, as well as several

board members who were involved with conference planning, and I asked what was going on, why was there this delay, that people needed to make plans, and it was very direct about the problems that I had talked with my colleague about. Well, one of the board members who I included in this email contacted me immediately and said that this email I had just written to the conference chair and the board was inappropriate. Wow. It was hurtful that I publicly humiliated this person by sending such a direct email and public email.

The other aspect of this was the organization was international and the conference chair was from a country outside the US where Norms for communication are much more indirect. I see so my email was doubly offensive on that front. So my email was doubly offensive on that front. Were you taken aback by this feedback? Because did you feel like I had done nothing offensive? And you were surprised by the reaction? I didn't think of it at the time when I sent the email how this could be embarrassing or hurtful. Because I didn't think I necessarily communicated in that way.

But after the fact when I was brought to my attention, I realized how because there's other people included on the email and it was such a direct statement of the problem, that it could certainly be taken that way. And so I felt bad about that afterwards. It wasn't just that Tia's fore-threat style was seen as rude. They seemed to be a fundamental mismatch between her method of communicating and that of her colleagues. She sometimes felt others were sugarcoding things to her or withholding critical information.

When she became president of the International Association for Conflict Management, she got the sense that some people were not saying what they really thought. When I was present this organization, we developed and implemented several policy changes to improve our governance. And one of the changes we were working on required a vote from the membership, and there was a period for people to provide feedback or suggestions. And so we didn't receive too much feedback during that comment period. The amendment passed overwhelming support.

However, later I came to find out that there were a few people who have concerns about the changes and voted against it. They never shared those reasons with me or others on the board. And to this day, I don't really know what their concerns were. And so I feel like the situation damaged some of the trust I had for them because I didn't know where they stood. And I wasn't able to rely on them to tell me their thoughts or ideas they had. And so if they had communicated their concerns with me or with others in the board, we may have been able to revise the policies to incorporate those ideas, to make them better, or at

least discuss them to give them some context or explanation for why we were implementing these changes. So, this experience highlighted to me some of the challenges to receiving feedback, serving them leadership role, you know, it's difficult to know what concerns people have because there's often this unwillingness to communicate critical information or feedback upwards. There's some irony here that this is the International Association for Conflict Management. The irony is not lost on me either.

Taya's experience is hardly unique. An organization's big and small around the world, within families and in interpersonal settings, people have different views about how bluntly they can speak and how bluntly they want others to speak to them. Most of us have struggled with this quandary. Is it better to be honest and to share exactly what is on our minds? Or is it better to be nice to pull our punches for the sake of protecting people's feelings. When we come back, research insights into this dilemma and how to resolve it.

You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Taya Cohen has noticed in her own life that her forthright manner of speaking sometimes comes across as rudeness. And she has also noticed that other people can often be elliptical or opaque instead of just saying what is on their minds. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that difficult and awkward conversations provide a window into human nature. They reveal a fault line in the way our minds work. She eventually came to see that people don't always avoid difficult conversations because

they are cowards. They avoid saying what they really think, because they feel torn between two powerful moral imperatives. So, I think of this dilemma between benevolence and honesty, where we often think we have to trade off between these two values, that we have to be kind and off or false hope or encouragement or praise versus brutal honesty. I mean that term brutal honesty suggests that honesty has to be hurtful and I don't think that that necessarily has to be the case.

So your research has found that the fierce people have around being honest, lead them to make some predictable mistakes and mistakes in conversations. And one such mistake is to be overly positive in the way they communicate negative feedback. Talk about this idea, Taya. How does this happen? So we often overestimate the magnitude of harm of our honest conversations, that we focus a lot on the immediate emotions of ourselves, of the other person. And we neglect to consider how helpful and useful the honest information could be.

So this can happen in performance reviews where the communication might be indirect or involve more praise, or they omit information. Sometimes people use a feedback sandwich, which is a technique where people find some positive information, and they try and quickly bury some negative information in the middle, and then end with more positive information. And that can lead to feedback recipients being really confused and not fully understanding the source of the problem

or how they might be able to improve because of it. And in fact, I understand there's been some research that suggests that sometimes supervisors are especially prone to give positive feedback to poor performers because they're worried that the poor performers would like them less if they give them honest feedback. Yes, they can focus on not hurting the feelings of these people and what they're neglecting to consider is that by failing to provide them with the information that they need, that that's actually causing further harm to the poor performers. Because now the poor performers don't have an opportunity to learn what they're doing wrong, and there's not necessarily support for them to

develop if they don't know what the problem is. Another problematic strategy we engage in is called paltering. What does this mean to you? What is what is paltering? What does this mean to you? What is what is Paul Turing? Paul Turing is using truthful statements to mislead others. And so this happens sometimes in negotiation where maybe someone's asked a question that they don't want to answer and so they'll say something that's technically true, but intended to give rise to a misimpression in the other person. Imagine you are looking to buy a car and you ask the seller if the car is in good shape, you know how is it working and they say well there's a brand new transmission which is true but the way they've answered it is designed to lead you away

from asking questions about the engine, which is having problems. So give me an example in an organizational setting where one person is giving feedback to another. How would paltering work, do you think? Someone asked for feedback on their presentation, and the feedback provider truthfully tells them that they thought the colors in their slides were great and that they, you know, had great graphics, you know, they're providing praise essentially, and it's true, but if they're using that to mislead or give rise to the impression that they thought the presentation was wonderful, if that's not what they believe to be true, then that could be an example of Paul Turing, or at least an example of failing

to communicate honestly. But yeah, another example, maybe besides the feedback directly, is when you think of job interviews, because people when they're in these situations, want to make a positive impression. And they may truthfully point out certain skills, certain relevant experiences, similarities they might have with the person interviewing them, but strategically omit certain information, or strategically move the conversation away from any areas that might suggest a lack of fit or a lack of relevant skills.

So Paul Turing goes along with these other kinds of communication tactics where people are trying to be honest in some ways, not make false statements or lie, but at the same time they're not fostering understanding of the truth. Yeah, you're sort of telling the truth, but not telling the whole truth, basically. Exactly. A third kind of misstep or error we make is just avoidance. We simply avoid difficult conversations altogether. Can you talk about this? I feel this must happen all the time in organizational settings,

family settings, interpersonal settings. Has this ever happened to you, Taya? Have you ever shirked from having a difficult conversation and avoided it altogether? I'm not one for avoidance, I would say. So that's, I think, for me, the challenge is more on figuring out how to incorporate the benevolence and kindness into the honesty and directness.

And also understanding when avoidance might be a good strategy, when certain things might be better left unsaid. And so trying to figure out what really will help the person or our relationship. Honesty is going to be important and the best strategy when there's useful information, when that could help the person. And it's going

to be particularly damaging when people avoid conversations or don't communicate. Honestly, that information could be helpful. But there's some situations where it may be better to not share everything you're thinking or certainly not sharing it in certain moments when it might not be appropriate to do so. Mm-hmm. So you would argue in some ways, telling your mom that the dress she was wearing was not quite right,

allows her to go in and change her dress. But if you commented, you know, in some aspect of her appearance, that she couldn't change, that might still be honest feedback, but it might not be particularly useful. Yeah, I agree completely. I think that would be harmful and damaging,

giving people feedback about things they can't change, either because they can't change in that moment. Five minutes before someone's presentation at work, you don't tell them that it's awful and there's nothing they can do about it. But if there's a day or more, where they can still make changes, that's when the honesty is helpful.

Same thing with closed people are wearing or appearance or other things along those lines. If there's nothing a person can do about it, then best not to raise it, at least then. Now, we do all of these things. We lie, we're mislead, we paltry, we avoid, because we're sure that things will fall apart if we tell the truth. And in some ways, popular culture backs us up in the movie Liar Liar, a lawyer undergoes a transformation where he is compelled to tell the truth at all times. I want you to listen to this clip, dear. Mr. Allen, you remember Fletcher? Oh, yes. Yes, nice to see you again, Fletcherie? Oh, yeah! Yeah, it's nice to see you again, Fletcher. I've been hearing some good things about you.

Well, Fletcher has just been telling me how much he thinks of you. But why don't you tell Mr. Out? He's a pedantic, pontificating pretentious bastard. A belligerent old fart, a worthless steaming pile of cow-dum. Figured if we speak. So in the movie Jim Carrey's life does fall apart when he starts blurting out the truth to everyone. Now Tanya, you recently conducted a study in which you had volunteers speak their minds, but perhaps without the same cruelty as Jim Carrey did.

Tell me about the instructions you gave your volunteers. The first study that I worked on in this area is with Professor Emil Levine, who is now at University of Chicago. And this one, she was a doctoral student at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and we ran a study in Philadelphia that we called the Challenging Exercise Study. And we said, throughout the next three days, be honest in every conversation you have with

every person you talk to. Really try to be completely candid and open when you're sharing your thoughts, feelings, opinion with others. It may be difficult, but try your best to be honest. And before we had people go out into the world and be honest in all their conversations, we had them predict what they thought this would be like. Right, what did they say?

Overall, people thought this was gonna be a pretty terrible experience, gonna be unenjoyable, going to damage my social relationships, be harmful. Overall, people thought this was going to be a pretty unpleasant experience. What happened was the exact opposite. people thought this was going to be a pretty unpleasant experience. What happened was the exact opposite. It was much more enjoyable than people anticipated that it was helpful for the relationships, created a strong social connection, and people were reasonably accurate on how liberating or meaningful the experience was. But overall,

it was surprising to the participants in the study and it was surprising to us as well. Because when we planned the study, we weren't expecting such a dramatic, positive impact of honesty. The responses, which we asked voice actors to read for us, reveal the extent to which honest feedback can change the trajectory of a relationship. One memorable example was a woman who broke up with her boyfriend over the course of the study.

Oh my gosh. But she was feeling so relieved by it because she'd been putting off having this difficult conversation. And she wrote that it affected my relationship with my boyfriend. I told him the truth about how I felt sometimes, which led to our breakup. Even though this was hard, she was so happy to be able to finally do this. And it highlighted to us how even when we have these difficult conversations where things you

know don't always work out well that she was still grateful for the experience because it was something that needed to happen. Another person shared, you know I felt less fake when I didn't have to lie about what I thought about some things or say I felt fine when I didn't. Tension was really building up with my roommate because I couldn't bring myself to tell her the things she was doing that were annoying. And while doing this study, I told her all those things I'd been avoiding to tell her for a long while. And it felt kind of liberating.

Some of the things were kind of awkward, but others felt good, and it did help ease some of the tension. I learned that it feels better to say those things instead of keeping them inside until it explodes. The results of TAAS study were just as dramatic when volunteers gave honest feedback in the workplace. One person shared, I was particularly surprised when being honest got me further in my position and in an organization because voicing my honest opinion made others think about the situation

more and come to the conclusion that I was thinking as well. Another person shared. People reacted differently than what I thought. They liked and appreciated the honesty, and honestly, I did not believe that was going to happen. It was refreshing, a meaning that I was happy to talk about what was on my mind and not worry about what was said. In other words, the volunteers reported that their relationships not only endured the 72 hours they spent being honest with others, they thrived. We asked people whether they

appreciated the experience, you know, the long-term benefits, two weeks later, the harm, the relational improvements. And in all these areas, people said the experience helped their relationships and their well-being. One thing that was interesting was that we had a similar condition, a parallel condition in the study where rather than asking people to be honest for three days, we asked them to be kind and prioritize kindness. In the case of kindness, people thought that would be a pretty good experience and it turned out it was, but with honesty, people anticipated that it would not be great for the relationships, but in fact it was and they said it was even more positive than those for whom we asked to be kind in all their communications.

So I understand that you followed up this study with another one where you asked volunteers to come into a lab with one of their close partners. What were you trying to do in this study and walk me through what happened? So, one of the limitations of the first study was we didn't know exactly what people spoke about or the conversations, how they unfolded,

who they were communicating with. So we wanted to then move on to a controlled study in a laboratory setting where we could have people write out in advance what they were going to say, and then read those responses, and then record the interactions. And so we, ran several follow-up studies after the initial ones where we had pairs of adults

come into the lab and we had them anticipate what it would be like to have an honest feedback conversation. And then we had them have the conversation. And so you actually had people have these conversations while you were present in the lab? Yes, they had to provide one piece of critical feedback to the person that came to the lab with. We asked them to share their honest opinions, feelings, reactions about one thing.

You think this person should do differently, change about themselves, or improve upon, and that they would have to read their message aloud and engage in a conversation with their partner about it. I'm imagining that people had significant anxiety about doing something like this. Yes, when we asked them to predict what this would be like, they didn't think this would be particularly enjoyable, they didn't think this would be great for the relationship, and they anticipated that their friend or their partner would react negatively to it.

their partner would react negatively to it. The feedback the volunteer shared with their partners ranged from the routine to the remarkable. You need to clean the apartment more. You also need to be more logical and efficient with problems that come up. I think you can work on being more prepared and more punctual to avoid situations like today. When you make a commitment, you should figure out how to get yourself ready to follow through on that commitment. You know, I think you should work on your impulse reactions and responses when you're frustrated or annoyed.

Sometimes your comments are blunt and accusational and are less productive. and are less productive. I think one thing you could improve on is your empathy and sympathy. I think sometimes you get caught up in how you feel, but it's also important to really think about other people's intentions. Wow, so these were fairly direct. I mean, these are the kinds of things that people might hesitate to talk about in general to you. So it's quite amazing that people were so direct with one another. Yes, I definitely don't think people would have had these conversations in this way unprompted. But similar to the first study where people were honest in all their conversations, in

this one, people anticipated that the person that they were communicating with was going to be economically, and the person themselves did not. Both according to how they evaluated themselves and how the communicator experienced it as well. And did you find again here that people felt closer to one another as a result of having expressed their thoughts honestly? Yes. The strong sense of social connection that it brought people together and did not drive them apart in the way that they expected. Why do you think that's happening? Why do you think that these having these honest

conversations or blunt conversations or fore-threat conversations depending on your choice of words? Why do you think these were actually increasing the intimacy between people? I think it's because during these conversations, it was clear that the person that came to the study with really did care about them. And even if that person was communicating bluntly or saying things directly, they were still providing them with feedback that could ultimately help them. [♪ Music playing in background, playing see the question was not really about whether it was better to

be honest or better to be kind. It was possible to be both at the same time. She started to evaluate communication strategies that could allow people to honour both moral imperatives simultaneously. When we come back, three principles to keep in mind, when you are debating whether to give someone difficult feedback. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In daily life, all of us confront a problem in our interactions.

How blunt should we be in our dealings with others? How forthright do we want others to be with us? At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologists, TAEA co-insteadies, how we can communicate more effectively without sacrificing either honesty or kindness. TAEA, one of the things that I took away from the experiments that you conducted,

perhaps one of the more striking things, is not just that people were wrong in anticipating that these conversations would be very difficult when they gave, you know, difficult feedback to people, but that the people receiving the feedback were often, if not enthusiastic, at least willing to accept the feedback. Can you talk a little bit about this idea, how many of us underestimate how hungry others are for feedback, including negative feedback. Yes, we underestimate others desire for constructive feedback. As feedback givers, we think a lot about the person's reaction

what they're going, how they're going to respond and whether the person will want this feedback or not. And we're often wrong about how much the other person would want to know. Think of this as technique number one in having difficult conversations. When you feel you want to communicate something tough to someone else, and you hear a voice inside your head telling you the other person won't want to hear your criticism, remind yourself that most feedback recipients want critical feedback even if it makes them unhappy. That's because even more than wanting to avoid unpleasant news, most of us instinctively

understand that unpleasant news can be useful. It isn't fun to receive a bad grade on a school paper or to hear that your outfit isn't quite working. But most people would say that given the choice, they'd prefer to know about the problem. Elaine in the TV show Signed Felt may not be happy to hear that everyone thinks she is a bad dancer, but that doesn't mean she doesn't want to know how others really see her. Is that bad? Have you ever seen yourself? I think one big reason people don't communicate honestly is because they focus on the social

harm and the negative emotions and that leads them to neglect, to think about all of these benefits that could be provided and just how much the other person might want to learn from them and need that information. So another way to not see honesty and benevolence and conflict with each other is to remember that although tough feedback might be painful in the moment, the benefits show up in the long run. Talk about this tension between the short term and long term benefits of honesty. So the long term benefits of feedback

is that the person could improve. And that's often in the future. Whereas in the present, what is happening in these conversations is often the provision of some kind of negative or critical information. And we have an easier time seeing and thinking about what's happening immediately in front of us, the short-term awkwardness or difficulty of the interaction and the more abstract longer-term benefits are more out of view.

I mean, it's also the case that when we give feedback to others, you know, the unpleasantness of the conversation of offering negative feedback is something that we experience in the moment. The benefits of that feedback is something that the other person might experience over the long term. Could this be another reason in some ways why we might be hesitant to share feedback? Because in some ways, the benefits of that feedback really accrue to the other person, the consequences of that feedback often accrue to us. Yes, I think that's part of it as well. I think the positive consequences can accrue to us when the feedback receiver tells us that what we shared helped them, but sometimes that's not shared, or if it's shared, it's far in the the future and we may not know just how much the comments

we made of the feedback we provided helped them. Think of this as technique number two. Remind yourself that even if you happen to be talking to someone who doesn't want to receive negative feedback, there are long-term benefits that could outweigh the short-term costs. Most of us do this instinctively with our children or with elderly parents and grandparents. We realize that sometimes we need to be the bearers of bad news because it's going to have long-term benefits. In fact, we are not honest with the people we love because we dislike them. We are honest precisely because we love them.

But if the first two techniques are about managing the feelings inside our own heads as givers of feedback, the next technique is to think carefully about the feelings of the feedback recipient. It's not enough for you to know that you are offering feedback because you care about the feelings of the feedback recipient. It's not enough for you to know that you are offering feedback because you care about the other person. You need to make that explicit. I think it's critical that the feedback recipient

feels supported, meaning that they feel like the other person cares about them, that they feel like they can change, that they can grow. And by communicating your benevolent intentions that you care about the person and that the reason you're telling them is potentially negative things about their behavior is to help them that engenders receptivity. And if the person is then receptive to it, then they can really listen and hear what you're saying and

then learn from the interaction. However, where people go wrong, or feedback viewers go wrong, is they think, well, the way to make the person receptive is to simply tell them nice things or praise them, general positive statements. And I think that is very different than conveying support and responsiveness to the person you're giving feedback to. I understand that research has suggested that expressing benevolent intentions might be especially important when the relationship is one that could be corroded by mistrust,

for example, a relationship between a white teacher and a black student. Can you tell us about research along these lines carried out by the psychologists David Yeager and his colleagues? Yes, they've developed an intervention they call wise feedback and they're highlighting this importance of support rather than praise. And this team of researchers has been some work with children in schools where they've changed how critical feedback is framed, and specifically reframing it to highlight that the feedback giver has very high expectations, and that they believe that the feedback recipient can meet those expectations. So they've used comments like, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them. And they found this is particularly affected for

groups of students who may not have a lot of trust in their teachers or the schools or who may not be feel supported in other ways. And I think it relates to this idea of being receptive to the feedback, because it's become clear why the feedback giver is providing those comments. And also it's removing these barriers to receptivity, because they're not defensive, because it's not as much of a threat. So in other words, if I'm giving feedback instead of saying, you know, do X or do Y, it might be important to preface that by saying, I really think that you are capable of doing X and Y, and here are my suggestions on how you can reach those high targets. Yes. Highlighting that you believe they're capable of reaching them, that the goal of you providing feedback is to help the feedback recipient reach their goals, and that you're responsive to their needs and what they're looking for.

You know, it's striking as we're talking, you know, I'm seeing how subtle these conversations need to be. I think many of us rush into feedback conversations either, you know, doing the things we discussed earlier. We, you know, avoid, or we paltryry or we mislead or we offer unnecessary praise, you know, or we just sort of blunder in and just sort of say everything that's on our minds. And I think really the picture that you're painting here is a picture that requires a fair amount of time and nuance and patience in order to communicate feedback both honestly,

effectively, but also benevolently. Yes, and it can be very challenging when our time is limited, when we have lots of different obligations. And so sometimes we just have a quick conversation and we say things, the other side doesn't fully understand the context of it, or we don't fully communicate that the reason we're giving these comments is for them to improve. And so a lot of problems, I think, can arise when we are communicating quickly or without thinking through how to best incorporate the support that's needed to provide the feedback along with the honesty. And so that that can lead us to just avoid having these conversations all together because they're hard. I'm wondering if this has happened to you, Tia. Have you had

situations where you're in a rush and someone's asking you for feedback, either professionally or personally, and in some ways the the constraint of time makes it actually difficult to provide feedback with the nuance that is required. Yes, so I certainly struggle with this when providing feedback over email and I find it's much easier for me to communicate kindness and support and and tact and other things when it's accompanied by a face-to-face conversation or on the phone, it's supposed to just written. So I will find myself kind of sending short emails, change this, do this, whether it's to my doctoral students or others I work with.

And I'm hoping they recognize that it's just about ways I think we can improve our work together. But I think it's also important to recognize that I don't know the person receiving that email when it's just a simple short, you know, the person receiving that email when it's just a simple short TURCE email, are they understanding, you know, that I have been able and intentions toward them that I really believe they can make things better and it's not an attack on their work. Yeah, and especially in sort of these very TURCE communications, you know, you're stripping out a lot of the human elements, you know, and we need to do that.

We need to sort of use these technologies in the interest of efficiency in professional situations, especially. But I can see how easily you can strip out the human element of this and convey the wrong impression. Right. Because misunderstandings are likely to arise when we're communicating only in a written format, when we lose a lot of information about the tone, about the context of the comments.

And increasingly, as we do more of our work over email, I think this is something to keep in mind that especially when providing feedback, it can be difficult to do when it's only in written format, when it's not accompanied by a conversation. So we talked earlier about how people from different cultures and different countries might have different notions of what's appropriate and conversations. In the example you gave me earlier where you wrote to the chair of the conference, I believe, you know, this was someone from another country and there could have been a misunderstanding here because in fact you had different, you know, background norms of how honest and forthright you were supposed to be in conversations.

I'm wondering how you navigate that divide. When we're communicating across cultures or with people from different countries, how does the same advice to both be benevolent and to be honest? How does that work? Can't we run into problems where other people have very different scales in terms of how much honesty and how much benevolence they expect. One thing I've learned in doing research on honesty is that there's a difference between being honest and being direct. And I think all cultures throughout the world value to a high degree, they value honesty and benevolence, right? These are values, maybe there's some variation, but where we see a lot of cultural differences

is around directness and communication. And it is certainly possible to be honest while still communicating somewhat indirectly. But what can happen in those situations, especially if people are from different cultures where they, they're not aware of all the cues and they're not necessarily understanding one another, is misunderstandings can arise

because the part didn't understand the indirect cues that people were using to communicate that information. And so I think we can differentiate the content of the communication, whether it is truthful or not. And that's when I think we can differentiate the content of the communication, whether it is truthful or not, and that's what I think of honesty. It's along those lines often, but from the way in which the information is communicated. And the communicator has a responsibility to communicate in a way that the recipient understands. And when people are communicating across cultures

or communicating in ways that are more indirect, that can be challenging. You know, I recently came by this website. It was a satirical website that looked at the way people in Britain and people in America use English. And it had sort of a translator, which basically said this is what it means when British people say X and this is what they actually mean and you know one of the things it says is when British people say quite good what they really mean is that this is not good and when they say you know with the greatest respect what they really mean is what you're saying is idiotic so there are differences between cultures in how direct people are willing

to be even when they're expressing honest feedback. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I think one common example that my students sometimes share when I teach about negotiations is, you know, when you are communicating with people in other cultures and you say, well, will this be done on time? And sometimes people might say, oh, yeah, sure, yes, knowing full well the answer is no, but they wouldn't want to say no because that might communicate a lack of respect, right? Because they're trying to communicate that benevolence and they wouldn't want to disrespect others. And they assume that the other person should know that the answer they're giving is not true.

And lots of misunderstanding to rise because the one side is saying, you should understand what I really meant by that response. Right. And then the other side is saying, well, you told me you would get this done, or that you would respond to this. And so we're trying to understand what do these words really mean. And you can easily see how both sides of that could feel they were being honest while thinking the other side was not.

What do you think of the other side? After spending years researching the psychology of unpleasant feedback, Tia once found herself in the kind of situation, she often sets up for volunteers in her experiments. She was confronting the possibility of a difficult conversation. All the usual concerns that her volunteers had now sprang to her mind. So this was a recent experience where a colleague who I didn't know very well

had reached out to me about potentially collaborating. He had some ideas and you'd had an initial call and then he sent me the paper. And going into this meeting, I was feeling like it was going to be awful. All the things I kind of had talked about in my research where people think these honest conversations could go really badly, because I had some critical thoughts about the paper.

Things I thought that could be changed or needed to be changed, reframing, things that didn't make sense to me, a major work would be needed. And so I didn't know this person very well. So I wasn't sure just how direct should I be, how much should I communicate, maybe this isn't what the person wanted, maybe they did. But it asked for my feedback and I really value honesty.

So I figured if the person was asking for my feedback or advice, then I would provide it to him. So going in, I was thinking this is going to be a difficult conversation and an unpleasant. I wasn't sure how I should handle it, but I communicated directly about the problems I saw. I also, I think, during the conversation was much better than in my written comments at conveying how I thought there was the seed of something interesting, and then if we made these changes reframed, then the good ideas could come through better. And so what happened rather than him being defensive or upset, he responded, like, wow, this is exactly what I was looking for.

This is so helpful. Yes, I can see that. Thank you. I wasn't aware of that, but now that you say that, I can see these problems. This is really helpful. And it went from the situation where I thought it was going to be terrible or could be terrible. And it ended up being a great experience. And at least what he told me during our call was how helpful it was. And afterwards, it strengthened my relationship, it helped him, and was much more enjoyable than I had anticipated. Teja Cohen is a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Teja, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Special thanks this week to Voice Actors Taylor Winkfield and Pedro Fetosa. For today's Unsung Hero, we bring you a story from our sister show, My An Sankiro.

Our story comes from John Mo. In the early 90s, John moved to Seattle to follow his dream of becoming a writer or an actor. Instead, he found himself working full-time in customer service at a software company. So I was working at a company called WRQ. It doesn't exist anymore. And it was very detailed, very dry. It wasn't anything fun. But I had undiagnosed.

I'd been dealing with depression for a long time by then. So I just had this inherent belief that other people got to do the cool things. And I had to go get a job that I hated and worked there till I died. I had gotten to know somebody in HR, one of the recruiting people in HR, because previous to that I had worked to a temp agency assigning temps and we had sent temps to this place. So I knew the HR department a little bit. And to get away from my desk, I just,

you know, would go for walks around the building, stopped in to see Jane, this woman in HR. And I'd just say, hey, how's it going? You know, just poking in, saying hi like you do. And she said, oh, well, you know, I'm glad to see you. I was thinking about you. She said, you, well, you know, I'm glad to see I was thinking about you. She said, you remember my husband, Ryan, and I had given Ryan a temp job. She said, you know, Ryan's at Amazon now and they've got some jobs.

They have a job coming up that requires somebody who's really creative. And she knew some of the other work I was doing on the side and the theater stuff and the comedy stuff. And I said, Oh, okay. So you want to know if I can think of anybody creative? And she's like, No, no, I mean you. And I said, Well, I don't know. I have a job here. And she said, you don't belong here, which is a hell of a thing to hear someone in HR.

Say your company. You're meant for something other than this. You're meant to do something else. You should be making your living being creative. And to me, it felt like I had been playing pickup basketball at the YMCA and somebody said, you know, you should, you should play for the Chicago Bulls. Like, it was, it was that ridiculous and idea. I think when someone has no confidence, when someone's beaten themselves down over so many years, which is often the case with depression, that, that one little thing can make such a difference. And I'm welling up right now

because somebody had seen something in me that I hadn't seen in myself. You know, now I host a show that is very personal, it's about mental health, and I go around the country giving speeches on mental health. I wrote a book called the hilarious World of Depression about my experiences with comedy and mental illness. And all of the stuff that I do requires confidence that what I have to say is worth an audience's time that I should be doing this, that I'm somebody you should listen to. And so I think Jane at WRQ gave me the ladder to get to that height of confidence that

I need to do all the work that I do today and to help the people I'm able to help. And so now, when I can tell somebody's really good at something and isn't giving themselves credit for it, I've done this with writers who are much less experienced than me, I try to tell them, you're a very good writer, you know, or you're an excellent reporter, because maybe they haven't been told that enough times.

And that confidence from hearing somebody say that, and I can always tell when I say that, when it's received and goes all the way to their heart, that that's going to give them the confidence to get to the next level. And so that they can get to that point, and they can tell somebody else that at some later point. You know, you have this in you, you can do this. John Moe of St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the host of the podcast, Dupresh Mode. If you enjoy the insights and ideas we feature on Hidden Brain and would like to support our work, please consider becoming a member of our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain

Plus. You can find Hidden Brain Plus on the Apple Podcasts tab or at apple.co slash hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. you