Here is the full transcript of social psychologist Tessa West’s talk titled “The Problem With Being “Too Nice” at Work” at TED 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Science of Uncomfortable Social Interactions
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.
Feeling Awkward in 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.
The Awkward Moment Ruse
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.
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.
Anxious Niceness in Negotiations
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.
The Impact of Anxious Niceness
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.
The Terrifying Implications
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.
The Downsides of Generic Positive Feedback
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.
Questioning the Niceness Culture
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.
The Dance 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?
Dimensions of Feedback
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.
The Importance of Specific Feedback
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.
Replacing Negative Behaviors
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.
Starting Small and Neutral
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.
Delivering Critical Feedback Nicely
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.