Ayelet Fishbach

The other reason that it's harder to learn from negative feedback is it's much more cognitive.

It's not what we expected to hear.

And so, you know, if you did something expecting something to happen and then it happened, like you kind of had a prediction that was supported with what later happened and you remember it.

When you get negative feedback, it's often not what you expected.

And that can be a very...

confusing experience for people.

And so they just don't learn.

It's just cognitively a harder task to learn from what's not.

It's learning by elimination.

So negative feedback is important.

There are often unique lessons in negative feedback, not to mention that if we don't learn from negative feedback, we are probably missing just a lot of the information that is out there.

And so we need to be able to do that.

and I mentioned giving advice and one of the strategies that we can use to learn from negative feedback, we also need to realize that it is so much easier to learn from positive feedback.

So, you know, whenever we can teach someone through positive feedback, they are probably going to be more attentive and better able to learn.

Yes.

And not only it puts you in a position of power and doing something useful for the feedback, helping another person, it also forces you to think about what you have learned.

And often when we ask people to give advice, in particular people that are struggling, their immediate response is like, what do I know?

Why would you ask me?

I'm unemployed.

Well, not me, but the person we are asking.