Is ignoring bliss?

Negative feedback helps us to perform better in the future. Yet, in some situations, we tend to ignore it. For example, we may rather get a coffee than read our manager’s critical comments. As performing well oftentimes allows us to achieve important goals (e.g., secure a pay raise), we found such behavior strange. To explain it, we developed (Chapter 2) and tested (Chapter 3-6) a model of negative-feedback disengagement in this dissertation. Its starting point is negative feedback’s collateral consequence: It makes us feel worse. According to the model, because of that, we do not only focus on performing better when we receive negative feedback but also on feeling better. The model proposes that we thus minimize how much attention we pay to negative feedback. This means that the model claims that we ignore (i.e., disengage from) negative feedback to manage how we are feeling and to feel better. The results of conducting several experiments and using different statistical methods showed that feeling better indeed matters in negative-feedback situations. Yet, contrary to what the model states, it is not wanting to feel better that influences what we do to feel different but rather wanting to perform better. We also found that how we manage our feelings has implications for whether we stick to our goals and how we perform (at school). Together, this dissertation highlights the necessity of studying people’s feelings (and what they do about them) in contexts that are prototypically performance oriented to better understand their behavior.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/ca0a519a-2194-4c75-9e64-95fba7e494a0