Tessa West
speaker
187 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2023
last heard Sep 2024
Tessa West’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But I actually really focus on the low-level types of jerk behavior, interruptions, you know, kind of ignoring people, writing a slightly rude email, or taking over a meeting, the kinds of things that we encounter in our everyday work lives.
I think it's fascinating to look at how people avoid feedback in uncomfortable situations.
As a social psychologist, that's really what I focus on is how people avoid feeling anxious and uncomfortable, even if it kind of hurts them in the end.
So one of the studies we talk about in this piece is really focusing on giving feedback to someone who obviously needs it in the context of losing a negotiation to that person in all the ways that which people will just avoid saying the thing instead of just being straightforward and honest in a way that's useful to the person on the receiving end.
I think we live in a culture where negative feedback is just seen as really inappropriate.
And probably more importantly, we don't learn how to do it in a constructive way.
So we're very afraid of it.
We're afraid it's going to backfire, that the person's going to do things like engage in reverse blame.
Well, maybe if you had done this better, I wouldn't be in this situation.
And I think that's typically how these things play out.
And so instead of learning the strategies to be better at it, we just avoid it completely.
So what we did in that study was we were interested in what happens when you're in a situation where clearly you need to give someone constructive feedback.
This person has just done a negotiation with you.
We've come in as scientists and said, hey, this person lost to you.
Why don't you give them some constructive feedback on what they could do?
So kind of the ideal situation where feedback makes sense.
setting them up for success in that situation, telling them even ways in which they could do this.
And most people just stuck with the positives.
What was fascinating, though, is at the same time we measured their physiology so we could see that their heart rate was kind of going through the roof, that they were very stressed out while delivering this positive feedback.
So we call this the brittle smiles effect, smiling, nodding your head, telling them you did great, all the while you look like you're on the treadmill at the same time because you're avoiding the negative stuff.
Showing 121–140 of 187 · page 7 of 10
← Previous
Next →