Sometimes when people have a low opinion of me, I get upset about that. I’m interested in investigating what emotional reaction I actually endorse here.
Getting upset about others having a low opinion of my is counterproductive in several ways: It puts my heart at war (see “Anatomy of Peace”) towards the person. It doesn’t put my in a great frame to find the truth in their criticism. So, getting upset means that I improve as a person less. Getting upset often proves that the person’s criticism is correct, while agreeing often proves it incorrect. David Burns recommends “disarming” when someone criticizes you: find the truth in their criticism, explain how it makes you feel, make further inquiries to better understand where they’re coming from. This type of technique almost always makes me feel better than just telling the other person that I think they’re wrong. When someone criticizes you, it can sometimes be a signal that you’ve made them feel bad. That’s an especially bad time to make them feel worse by picking a fight.
So, getting upset has some bad consequences. Why do I do it anyways? Some reasons:
- Someone having a low opinion of me is a world state that I happen to not like. Suppose someone has the opinion that I’m not a very caring person, while I desire to be a very caring person; then, this person is asserting that the world is a way I don’t like. If I could just convince them that they’re wrong, or convince myself that they’re wrong, the world would go back to being in the state that I want.
- Someone having a low opinion of me may have consequences I dislike. If my boss thinks I’m a bad employee, maybe he’ll fire me, or restrict my autonomy. If someone publicly expresses a low opinion of me, it will likely update others towards having a low opinion of me.
- Sometimes I get upset because I feel that the critique is unfair, or wrong.
- Feeling remorse over this bad outcome might be useful: maybe it helps you remember in the future to not do things that would lead to similarly undesirable outcomes.
- Getting upset at someone feels like a way of shielding yourself from feeling bad about their critique by being angry at this person instead of down on yourself. Note that it’s unclear how effective this technique is.
- Saying that the other person is wrong to the critique is a reason not to feel bad about having done something bad.
Here are some cases I might feel upset that seem informative:
- A journalist runs a smear campaign against you, where they are blatantly lying.
- You’re having a fight with someone and they make an extremely general and absolute claim “you don’t care about me at all, you never have” — a claim that seems very unlikely to you to be true in virtue of how all-or-nothing and general it is.
- You forget about an appointment with someone, and they say “you’re not showing up is evidence that you didn’t think the event was very important, and that you don’t care about me very much”.
- You make a subpar output at work, and your boss says you really messed up in your time allocation here.
- Alice says “Bob, you’re an idiot”. Bob says “that makes me feel sad”. Alice says “well, it’s true. I mean, on this one objective measure of your intelligence, you scored really low”.
Analysis
There’s some tension. Feeling remorse seems very healthy. Feeling angry distances you from the person and makes it hard for you to productively update on the experience, or make reparations. Feeling upset might help you take actions to protect yourself if this is appropriate. Feeling upset can be totally unproductive if the way that you’ve failed isn’t really something you can chance in the future. Feeling upset can harm your epistemics.
I think the solution can maybe be captured by a recent perspective I’m interested in embracing:
Care about processes, not outcomes.
This is a pretty complex topic, which I’ll address more in a future blog post. I think it’s extremely non-obvious that you should care about processes instead of outcomes.
But let’s apply the principle to this situation anyways.
My advice to myself here is:
I should love the process of responding well to criticism. The process I endorse is basically the David Burns process: find truth in the criticism, express some remorse (but not too much!), inquire to understand it better, express your feelings, have a conversation about it, figure out how you could do better in the future. N, B, and L also remark that an important part of responding to criticism is informing your counterparty about your generalization properties. L recommends explaining why what you did was wrong in detail; this can impart your counterparty with some justified confidence that you’ll act differently in the future. A mistake I’m prone to making is granting the other person that they’re right that I’ve wronged them, and trying to make things better, or convince them of my generalization properties via reference to other events. This is wrong, because as L mentioned above, actually engaging with why you are being criticized was important for convincing them that you’re on similar pages about what happened. So, I should avoid this mistake. B remarks that maturely handling feedback is just an important skill which ppl need to know you have in order to trust you.