So why is it the case
that when we are feeling
the most anxious, uncomfortable,
socially awkward versions of ourselves,
when our hearts are pounding
and our palms are sweating
and we feel like crawling out of our skin,
are we also the most nice
and often generic to the people around us?
I'm a social psychologist,
and I've been studying the science
of uncomfortable social interactions
for over 20 years.
So everything from new
roommate relationships,
negotiations,
upward feedback with your boss
to doctor patient-interactions,
those moments where you need
to break in and say,
"Yeah, for the last 20 minutes,
I actually have no idea
what you were talking about.
Can we maybe rewind a bit?"
And to study these things,
I look at three main outcomes.
First, I look at what people say,
the things we can control,
how friendly we are,
how much we complement one another,
how much we give gracious feedback.
Second, I look at the things
that are tougher for us to control,
our nonverbal behaviors,
things like fidgeting,
avoiding eye contact,
playing with our hair,
doodling even,
even our tone of voice.
And then I look at the things
that are impossible for us to control
our under-the-skin responses,
our physiology,
our cardiovascular reactivity,
things like blood pressure, heart rate,
these types of things
that we often don't even really
realize that we're feeling.
And the way I do this is by having
people come into the lab
and interact with each other
in a bunch of different settings,
and I have them negotiate with each other,
I have them get acquainted
with each other.
And often it's the case
that in these interactions,
people are required to give some form
of feedback to their partner.
Tell them honestly
what they're thinking or feeling,
come in with an offer for a negotiation,
tell them what they could have
done better next time.
And I think we all kind of know
what it feels like
to be in one of these studies.
You might not know what it would really
feel like to be in one of my studies.
There's a lot of equipment involved,
but we plug people up
to all of these things
to measure these under-the-skin responses.
We videotape them to capture
those behaviors that I just mentioned.
Now, to get us all into this mindset
of what it's like to feel awkward,
but maybe potentially a little bit nice,
I want you all to think
about what was the last
awkward interaction that you had.
OK, so keep this thought in your mind.
You can think about it for a few moments,
because in a couple minutes,
I'm actually going to randomly
call on someone based on your seat
to have you come up
and share your story
of what that moment felt like.
So before we do that,
I just want you all to kind of get a sense
of the typical pattern that we see
when people are engaging
in these interactions.
So we bring them into the lab,
we hook them up to all this equipment
and within moments,
within the first 20 seconds,
we start to see those stress
responses that I mentioned.
Their heart rate goes up,
their blood pressure increases.
It doesn't take much to get people
to start to feel anxious.
Next, we see it
in those nonverbal behaviors.
They start to fidget,
they avoid eye contact,
they pull their chair a couple inches away
from the person
who's sitting next to them,
in an effort just to get
a little bit more distance.
One of my favorite findings
is in doctor-patient interactions,
uncomfortable doctors,
they look down at the chart more,
or they look more at the computer screen
instead of making eye contact
with those patients.
So let's all return
to your awkward moment.
Does everyone have an awkward moment
in mind or thinking about one?
How many of you have
increases in your heart rate,
maybe your palms are sweating?
You can start to feel yourself
getting a little tingly
just with the mere thought
of being called upon today?
Hey, a few of you.
How many people would actually
be excited about that opportunity?
Not -- OK, same people.
(Laughter)
How many of you, if I did call on you,
would walk up here,
you would grin through
gritted teeth like this
and you would do it even though
you secretly hated me the whole time?
A few of you.
Don't worry, I'm not going
to actually do this.
This was all just a ruse
to teach you a lesson
which is, in uncomfortable
social interactions,
we often don't have
a social script of what to do.
Instead of telling people
what we really think, what we really feel,
we do the nice thing
that makes us incredibly uncomfortable.
Now one of my favorite findings
illustrating this effect
is in the context of negotiations.
I went to a major firm
and I brought people together
who were used to working with one another,
and we had them engage in a negotiation.
And at the end of it,
there was a winner and there was a loser.
So we said to the winner,
you know, this is really
a study about feedback.
And what we would like you to do
is give some constructive feedback
to the person who just lost.
What are some things
that they could do better next time?
What are some potential missteps?
How many of you think
that that's what they actually did,
they really followed our instructions?
OK, nobody.
[You] can see where this is going.
What we found is that even
when we're talking to someone
who just lost a negotiation to us,
we tend to bend over backwards.
We say things like,
"The way you made that really early offer
and didn't even ask for a counter,
that was amazing."
Or "It was so great how you didn't even
ask me anything about my side,
or what I was willing
to kind of, you know,
change on or be flexible on."
People layered on the compliments
to someone who they just
beat in a negotiation,
telling them how great they are.
So often these kinds of interactions
that take the form
of what I’ll call “anxious niceness,”
they involve a lot of compliments,
telling people what they do well
in a very general, non-specific way.
But a lot of my work actually looks
at what's it like to be
on the receiving end
of these types of interactions.
How do you feel when you interact
with someone over and over again
who's giving off
these kinds of brittle smiles?
These are typically
the kinds of facial expressions
that we actually see from people,
kind of sneering,
a little bit of side eye,
you know, arms crossed,
these types of things.
After a lifetime
of interacting with someone
who engages in anxious niceness,
what we find is that most people
on the receiving end
are racial minorities.
They are disadvantaged group members,
they are the type of people
that we are worried about appearing
prejudiced in front of,
and that anxiety is regulated
by being over-the-top nice to these folks.
We also find that these individuals
tend to be more synchronized to
and attentive to the how-we-say-it piece
than the what-we-say part.
So in one study, we had Black
and white Americans
interact with each other
in a cross-race interaction,
and we brought them into the lab
and we measured the physiology
of both partners.
What this allowed us to do
is capture the degree
to which people stress.
Those under-the-skin responses
can actually be caught by their partners.
And what we expected to find
is that the Black participants
would become more synchronized,
physiologically, to those whites.
They'd be more attuned to those,
kind of, nonverbal signals of anxiety.
And that's exactly what we found.
The more anxious those white
participants appeared,
the more they fidgeted,
the more they avoided eye contact,
even the higher their cortisol reactivity,
indicating some real deep,
kind of, under-the-skin stress response,
the more those Black participants
became linked up to them over time.
And I think this finding
is a little bit terrifying.
I think it means that we often think
of our own stress and our own physiology
as independent of the people
we interact with,
but our bodies are not always our own,
our physiology is not always our own.
And if you spend a lifetime interacting
with people who are so nice to you,
in an effort to control their anxiety,
you could potentially catch that stress.
It could negatively affect your bodies.
Now often what we find
is the type of feedback
that people are actually getting
isn't always super direct.
Sometimes it's a little bit patronizing.
So you could probably see
where I'm going with this.
Having over-the-top positive nice feedback
can harm your performance,
it can make it very difficult
for you to climb up,
difficult to kind of know where you stand,
what you should do better,
what you should stop doing,
but can also damage people in ways
that we often don't think about.
It can affect their reputations
outside of the interaction context.
So imagine the case
that you're one of these people
who loves giving
this general, nice feedback,
and you have someone who works for you,
and a recruiter calls,
maybe a past employee,
a recruiter calls you,
or someone asks you
for a letter of recommendation,
the kinds of things you're going
to put are going to be like,
"They're are real team player."
"They have great energy at work."
Generic things.
Yes, they're nice,
but they are not very telling
about what that person is really like.
And what we find is that the readers
of these things, at best,
think to themselves,
"Wow, they must not really know
this person at all.
I don't even know what this means."
At worst, they think to themselves,
"Well, they probably have
some real opinions.
They're just afraid to share them."
So these kinds of general
positive feedback
tend to actually harm people's reputation
when they're not backed up with real data.
So I think we have to then think
about what is the solution
to this problem.
Is it the case that we should all
just be meaner to each other
in an effort to be more direct?
I don't think that's the case at all.
I think there are some things we can do,
and I'm going to highlight three of them,
to improve the degree
to which we give clear,
consistent feedback to people,
particularly in the workplace.
So first we need to ask
ourselves the question,
how many people are on board
with this niceness culture, really?
There's a bit of a plural
ignorance that goes on
when we think about how nice
we are to people at work.
What I've found
is that for every one person
who loves this kind of general,
generic, nice feedback,
there's another person
who feels like it's lazy,
who feels like it's not helpful.
And I actually learned
this lesson the hard way
from one of my students recently.
She was giving a practice talk in my lab,
and she spent weeks
and weeks preparing it,
probably harder than anyone
else I'd ever seen
on preparing a talk like this.
And then she went and gave it,
and she came back and I said,
"How did the talk go? Did it go well?"
She said, "It was terrible.
It was horrible.
It was the worst experience."
I said, "Well, what happened?"
And she said, "All I got were
a bunch of 'Great jobs,'
‘That was interesting’
and then some clap emojis
from the people on Zoom.
Not a single person asked
a tough question," she said.
And I had this moment where I realized
that positive feedback
can come across as lazy feedback.
It can come across
as disengaged feedback.
And so if we want to change this culture,
we actually need to first do a quick pulse
of how many people are actually
more interested in doing the tougher,
constructive forms
of this type of feedback.
So you might be thinking to yourselves,
"Alright, I might be on board
with this idea of tough,
yet honest feedback.
So what should I do?
Should I go to people and say,
’Alright, do you want me to be ... nice
or honest and useful?'"
No, do not do this.
You will, by and large,
get a lot of people telling you,
"You know, I actually
just want to keep it nice.
That just feels a lot more
comfortable for me."
What I learned in my work
is that this process
I've been talking about,
about giving anxious, nice feedback,
is just as much
about the feedback receiver
as it is about the feedback giver.
People get into a bit
of a dance with each other.
I give you nice feedback,
you kind of know it's BS,
but you smile and say thank you
and then, you know, go on your way.
It takes a lot to break
that interpersonal cycle.
And to do that,
we have to think
about how we actually want
to frame our feedback to other people.
So instead of asking people,
"Should I be nice or honest and useful?"
What I like to do is ask people,
"Can I give you feedback
on a couple dimensions?"
Can we think about feedback
as general versus specific?
Another dimension would be,
can we think about things
that you're doing well
you should keep doing
versus things that "please stop."
And I'll get in a moment
to how we can actually frame
that form of negative feedback.
So I think a lot of us
are actually pretty decent
at the positive general feedback, right?
"I love how timely you are."
But what does that mean?
It could mean that you're
on time for meetings,
it could mean that you turn
your work in on time,
it could mean it in a very global way of,
"You sure managed to do
a lot in five years."
Or it could mean something so specific,
like, “It’s so helpful that you send in
your reports by 5 pm,”
but I don't really want to comment
on all those other kinds
of forms of being timely.
And when we do the kind of general
feedback that is negative,
the "please stop,"
we need it to be specific.
So kind of, one of the more common forms
of general negative feedback people get
is "You don't take
enough initiative here."
How many of you have ever been told,
“Please take some more initiative”?
I think most of us at some point
in our lives have experienced this.
What does that mean?
Does it mean I should speak up
more in meetings?
Does it mean I should be
quicker on my email?
Does it mean I should do your job
without complaining about doing your job,
which is often what it actually means?
We have to break it down
into the specifics,
and that could include things like,
"Don't wait for Tom to ask
if you found any errors
before you say,
'Tom, I found some errors.'"
Now an important piece here
is what people should do instead.
Often if we get to the stage
where we're comfortable
enough telling people,
“I have a specific, critical, negative
thing I want to tell you,” --
“Please stop interrupting people,”
you know, not telling Tom
about the errors,
showing up five minutes late with coffee
so I know what you were doing
during those five minutes --
we don’t tend to replace them
with anything,
but we know from our personal lives
that replacing negative critical,
"please stop" behaviors
is absolutely essential.
So I want to take you out
of the workplace for a moment.
And we're going to go to the bedroom.
Yes, I said we're going to the bedroom.
So imagine it's the case that you just
had sex with someone for the first time.
OK, we're all there, we've done
a lot of mentalizing today.
And you turn to the person and you say,
"Those last three things
you just did back there,
no good.
They're all bad.
Didn't like any of them."
They're going to look at you in shock
and surprise and say,
"Well, what should I do instead," right?
And until we're ready
to actually fire the person
or kick them out of bed
or fire them from our team,
we have to focus
on those replacement behaviors,
what they should be doing instead.
And I think as we think through
kind of, scaling this type of feedback,
it can be very scary to make
these types of change.
What I found is that cultures of anxious,
nice feedback are ingrained.
They're systemic,
they are deeply embedded in a community,
in the workplace, in a team,
even in dyadic
interpersonal relationships.
And so to break that cycle,
you have to start small,
you need to start neutral.
And by neutral I mean things
that are not scary
to hear critical feedback on.
You might be thinking to yourself,
what's some neutral feedback
that you could give me
at the end of my talk?
How about "I would switch the order
of the points on your talk"
or "I would change the font."
These types of feedback
are specific, and so they're useful,
but they're not scary to deliver
and they're not actually scary to receive.
And what we find is that when people
take these baby steps
to work up to this type of feedback,
they are much less
anxious in the delivery.
So those behaviors I opened with
of people fidgeting,
engaging in what we call a brittle smile,
avoiding eye contact,
they actually go down
and so do those stress responses
when you know and you're anticipating
giving this kind of feedback
that isn't going to sting.
And I think as you work through this,
I don't want to be a proponent
of killing niceness entirely.
I think it's actually really important
to put niceness in the delivery
of your feedback,
and that can come across
in a bunch of different ways.
It can come across as by showing
you're engaged, you listened.
You know what the person's
actually trying to do,
you're aligned with their goals.
The first time I actually got this type
of critical nice feedback
was after a talk I gave
and the person came up to me and she said,
"Can I give you some feedback?"
And immediately my heart started pounding.
I'm like, oh great, here we go.
No one likes hearing,
"Can I give you some feedback?"
And she opened with three things
that she thought I did well.
"I really liked points one, two
and three you made in that talk.
They really resonated with me.
But you have this habit
when you're concentrating
of looking up and to the right,
and so you spent half the talk
kind of staring at the ceiling
or the exit sign in this case,
instead of making eye contact
with the audience.
And it's distracting
and it creates a distance."
So I thought a little bit about it
with my eyes probably
rolled up inside my head,
and I thought, OK, I can
actually make that change.
It doesn't feel super scary.
And so I did.
I made that change, and I thought
about how she framed that feedback
through this culture of niceness.
So I want to wish you all luck
on your journey of trying to change
culture of feedback,
killing anxious niceness,
and hopefully have some concrete steps
to help you move forward.
Thank you.
(Applause)