The Thought Before the Defense

A comment lands on a draft: “This section does not work.” The thought moves before any reply is typed. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it shows up as heat in the face. Research gives it other labels, and the studies read for this article did not test whether a thought comes first.

Two doors

The thought has two doors in front of it. Behind one, it asks: what exactly does not work? Behind the other, it says: this is about who the writer is. The second door is the one research worries about.

A 1996 meta-analysis of 607 results on feedback found that feedback improved performance on average, but in over a third of cases it made performance worse. The theory built from it proposes that feedback works while attention stays on the task and backfires when attention moves to the self. These were experiments with performance feedback, not studies of criticism between people.

The case for the defense

Next the thought builds a case. It says: this is unfair. It collects the reasons the comment cannot be right. Psychologists call the habit of explaining good outcomes by one’s own doing, and bad outcomes by outside causes, the self-serving bias. A 2004 meta-analysis of 266 studies found it in nearly all samples. It was smaller in Asian samples than in U.S. samples. A later study of newspaper quotes from Olympic athletes found self-serving explanations in both Japan and Australia.

The thought can also be right. The comment may be wrong. The research describes a tendency, not a verdict on any one comment.

The sting

Underneath, the thought reports a sting and offers two moves: answer back, or say nothing. A well-known 2003 brain-scan study of being left out of a ball game found activity in regions also tied to physical pain, and the idea spread that social hurt resembles physical pain. A 2014 study found that the patterns inside those regions differ, and concluded that rejection involves distinct representations. Both studies were about exclusion, not criticism.

What the studies cannot say

Whether the thought comes before the defense or after it is not known. The studies read here did not separate the two.

Whether criticism feels like exclusion is open. The brain studies are about exclusion, and the feedback studies are about task performance.

Most studies of the self-serving bias came from Western samples. How the thought behaves elsewhere is less clear from them.

What each thought contains

• The work-thought holds a detail of the work.
• The self-thought holds “I am” or “the writer is”.
• The unfairness thought holds a reason the comment cannot be right.