By Mike Lavelle
Recently, I was reading a Facebook post from one of our political leaders. It was a post that contained no political angle or spin, it was just a post about them engaged in a fun activity. What caught my attention was all the negative responses from people who took the opportunity to criticize the post (and poster), it seemed almost for sport. It does not matter what party this person belonged to as I have seen this behavior evident in regards to political actors in both of our main two political parties.
This reminds me of an assertion that I once read, that for every negative comment a person hears it takes seven positive comments to balance out the one negative comment. This got my attention. I was especially interested in what sort of studies might support this claim. It seems experientially true, but what does the research show? Therefore, I spent some time doing some preliminary research. (Often, facts are asserted with no documentation or citation – many times, a little exploration shows they are not supported by fact). I found many sites that addressed suggested various positive to negative rations, from 7 to 1 to 4 to 1. Aside from ascertaining a specific ratio, what I did find is that there is serious research on positive to negative ratios and that high performing teams have high ratios of positive to negative and low performing teams have low ratios (meaning lots more negative feedback than positive – (see the research of Marcial Losada).
Researcher John Gottman notes that marriages that are successful have a ratio of at least five positives to one negative. Gottman calls it the magic ratio. Parenting experts also claim that successful parenting means making sure that you keep your positive to negative ratio high. One clear indicator is that one positive comment does not cancel out one negative comment. It seems that it takes multiple positives to cancel out just one negative.
There is a story I read years ago in the May 1991 issue of “The Family Handyman.” The editor recounted a memorable experience occurring early in his career. He was 23 years old, fresh out of college and it was the first day in his new job as a carpenter’s apprentice. It seems he spent a long period of time trying to figure out how to neatly join three pieces of 3/4 inch quarter-round molding in an inside corner. It was not easy, nor was it going easy. The contractor approached him and said, looking real hard at him, “What’sa matter, college boy? How much time are you going to spend playing with that?” Just then his crew head, Dave, came over and responded to the contractor, “That’s how he learns, Jerry. Just like we all learned. Leave him be.” Dave showed him how to use a coping saw to cut inside corners. Sometimes a positive comment goes much further than unnecessary criticism. Short of that, sometimes negative criticism is just not helpful at all. It seems that there is enough of that going around as it is. This is why at The Vail Voice, we have section called “Good News,” where we can share the positive actions of others. If you have a submission, please send it to editor@thevailvoice.com
