It's Not My Fault!
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever noticed when you offer a friend or a colleague or a partner a suggestion for improvement, they often experience an urge to defend themselves? Rather than listen to how they might change or do something better, they try to preserve the status quo. Like generals fighting a war, they try to protect every square inch of the person they are instead of embracing the person they might become. If you missed that episode, I'd urge you to go back and listen to it in this podcast feed. Today, we look at one of the most powerful reasons we fail to make changes in our lives. Very often, the people around us can see what we need to do differently or better.
But when they tell us, when they offer us feedback or, heaven forbid, criticism, we respond with anger, with denial, with defensiveness. This is a paradox because many of us also believe we want to live lives of continuous improvement. What better way to improve than to listen to suggestions for improvement? What causes so many of us to feel defensive? How can we listen better to feedback and offer feedback in a manner that will be heard? Overcoming defensiveness as a way to improving our lives. This week on Hidden Brain.
We've all been there.
Someone pipes up at a work meeting to ask why we were late. Or a partner tells us we need to do a better job cleaning up after ourselves. A friend asks why we haven't called in a while. Almost effortlessly, the excuses come. The traffic was bad. If the sink was not full of dirty dishes, we would happily wash up our mugs. Did our friend not know that we have been going through a really difficult time at work? At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Emily Falk studies the science of defensiveness and what we can do about it. Emily Falk, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Emily, you are very close to your grandmother, Bev. Recently, she shared with you her thoughts about the time that you spend with her. Can you paint a picture of what happened that evening, Emily?
Yeah, it was a typical night in my house. And what that looks like is one of my kids was jumping up and down on the couch. He was playing his guitar. The other kid was trying to show my grandmother something. something that he had built, probably a Lego creation, like kind of really, really close up in her face. I was trying to get dinner on the table. So you can imagine sort of dishes clanging and my phone is probably pinging with emails and text messages from people that I work with who would really like a response very quickly. And when I was in that situation, I sort of had this sense of like, oh, my gosh, there's so many different things that I'm trying to juggle right now. And in that particular moment, I decided that I was going to prioritize a little bit of time with my grandmother.
And my grandmother, Bev, is now 100 years old and she's one of my very favorite people. So she's over at my house for dinner and I went over to her. I left, you know, the pasta going and handed that over to my partner to handle. And I took her hand and I walked her outside and sort of in the dusk, I was feeling like a little bit of a sense of relief. Like I was feeling like, okay, we're getting outside, we're getting a little quality time together. And I felt like I had made the right decision until she turned to me and she said that even though she really liked coming to my house and seeing my kids, who are some of her very favorite people, she said, we aren't really spending time together. And, you know, it really struck me when she said that because, like, I really didn't want her to be right about that.
Like, of course we're spending time together. What do you mean? Like, you're over here making dinner for all of us and, you know, we're outside together now. So what do you mean we're not spending time together?
So
Can you just describe what went through your heart as you heard that, Emily? I mean, you're juggling a lot. You're dealing with your kids.
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