why your brain ignores praise and obsesses over criticism

The other day, while wandering through the wonderful world of the internet, I came across a claim that went something like this: a Harvard study says you need at least five compliments to counteract one criticism.

This reminded me of an anecdote about a university professor who asked his students for feedback and almost all of them, around 95%, said they loved his classes. But there were two people in the class who said they were bored and didn’t find them interesting at all. And instead of focusing on the very positive feedback from most of his students, the professor got stuck on the negative feedback from just two people in the class, which, statistically speaking, is nothing.

But that’s how the human mind works, right?

If one negative comment also makes you suffer a lot, or even stays with you for days and you can’t stop thinking about it, keep reading because this will interest you.

It’s curious how every time someone wants to tell a super-interesting anecdote, they try to cite some revolutionary Harvard study that reveals something impressive.

So that caught my attention and I thought, I’m going to look up the study and see what it’s actually about, because social relationships are one of the most important pillars of our lives, and understanding how we work socially can open more doors than most people realise.

And here’s where I was surprised: that study turned out not to be valid. It hadn’t been done properly, so it wasn’t accepted as solid. Apparently, the Harvard study came from a Harvard Business Review article that popularised the positive-to-negative ratio (5:1) from researchers Losada and Heaphy, applied to teams in the corporate world.

But, but.

The study was called into question because the mathematical formula supporting that exact ratio was criticised as invalid, so that number can no longer be used as a solid scientific rule.

However, there are many studies, not necessarily from Harvard, that have looked into this field, such as a review article titled ‘bad is stronger than good’, published in Review of General Psychology in 2001 by Roy Baumeister and his team, where they found this:

All else being equal, a negative experience usually carries more weight than a positive one.

In other words, when a positive experience and a negative experience have more or less the same intensity, the negative one usually has a greater psychological impact.

But we can also see it in many other examples cited in this study, such as the fact that losing money hurts more than gaining the same amount feels rewarding, or that being abandoned by friends has a stronger impact than making new ones, and, as we saw in the professor example, criticism carries more weight than praise.

And you might say, but why does this happen?

It’s not that good things, positive things, don’t matter. It’s that they usually need more quantity, more repetition, so they can accumulate over time and become strong enough to offset the impact of the negative.

So in the study, they reached these conclusions:

Negative events produce a stronger emotional reaction. That’s why their impact can be stronger than the praise you might receive.
Negative experiences last longer. That’s why you spend days, if not weeks, going over that negative thing someone said to you.
Our dear brain processes the negative more, and more deeply. Bad impressions form earlier and are harder to undo. That’s why one bad experience with a person can leave a much stronger mark than several good ones.
On the other hand, as human beings, we’re more motivated to avoid bad outcomes than to pursue good ones. Hence such common expressions as better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
And finally, the good can compensate for the bad, but it usually needs quantity. In other words, one single positive experience doesn’t always compensate for a negative experience of similar intensity, but many positive experiences can.

So as that wonderful Harvard study that later turned out not to be as solid as it seemed suggested, well, it did point towards something the scientific literature has found, which is that the negative carries more psychological weight than the positive.

But the good thing about all this is that once you know how your brain works, you understand why a negative experience, whether it’s criticism or an unpleasant situation you’ve been through, can hit you so hard and cause you so much suffering.

So instead of torturing yourself by trying to convince yourself that a negative situation shouldn’t affect you so much when, in comparison, you’ve also lived through loads of positive situations, now you understand why the two don’t feel equal.

Once you understand how your mind works, you can relate to it in a healthier way.

You can stop one negative experience from completely sinking you, and learn how to turn it around and get through it.

And if you need help with this, I can help. Not just by sharing useful information, like these scientific studies, but by helping you work through it, so one negative experience doesn’t take over your whole head.

It’s easy, it’s here.