You suck! Why criticism is more powerful than praise. People often take criticism too seriously. However, telling them this counts as criticism, so it just makes things worse. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy. Self-serving bias Generally, people like to think well of themselves. Confirmation bias Performing on stage, displaying your art, writing a blogpost that really should be wrapping up now, these are typical ways that people put themselves out there in order to entertain or inform others.
Topics Psychology Brain flapping Mental health blogposts. Reuse this content. The participants were asked to rate the degree of intentionality of the action on a scale from 1 not at all intentional to 8 completely intentional. They observed that when a person first reads the story and judges whether the actions of the characters deserve to be criticized, his or her amygdala, an area of the brain closely tied to the control of emotions, is activated. The more the person is affected by the story, the higher the activation in this area.
On the contrary, when the actions are considered to be positive, the amygdala is less active. How can we explain the difference? Source: Ngo, L. Scientific Reports 5, dec. How It Works? Close Login. Forgot your password? Click here. Submit Log in Please wait Consider some important and moderately difficult task performed regularly by someone who works for you.
So you begin monitoring his work and giving him either positive or negative feedback, criticism or praise, after every performance. Consequently, when he performs worse than average, since performance naturally varies around a mean, he most likely will perform better the next time even if you say or do nothing — because his performance will naturally regress or move toward his mean or average level.
In the same way, when your person performs above his mean level, he most likely will perform worse the next time even if you say or do nothing — because, again, his performance is regressing to the mean.
And the most likely consequence will be that you criticize far more than you praise. A lot of evidence suggests that positive reinforcement — identifying and building on strengths — will produce better results than a relentless focus on faults. This is important. To improve, people need positive feedback. I completely agree with the idea that positive reinforcement is key and focusing on faults in yourself or anyone else will not help you improve your results in work, love, or life….
In accordance with Rational OptimismTM, your thoughts really ought to be constructive and to some extent rationally positive in order to perform your best on any given task and consistently. Focusing on strengths and benefits will likely increase the quality of your average performance over time if not immediately. What it usually does it chip away at the self esteem, causing people to become very defensive and decreasing their productivity.
From my experience of teaching children, this is true from a very young age — those who are praised and told that they are intelligent perform better than those made to believe that they are useless. Sadly, a lot of adults have taken criticism seriously since childhood after all, when we know so little about the world, how else can we learn whether we are intelligent or dumb?
It seems the key is to praise kids for effort, rather than for results. But the good thing is that kids growing up today get praised waaaay more, which is great! Thank you for sharing this thoughts.
I do agree that positive reinforcement by way of identifying and building on their strengths will definitely produce better results than focusing on their faults. This is not just true with adults but with kids as well.
They need to be praised on their good work so that they would be motivated to do much better the next time.
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