Psychology of positive, negative feedback

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified)
in
Manager Tools Trinity

I wanted to share an HBR blog post on encouraging future desired behavior:  Can we reverse the Stanford prison experiment? 

What caught my eye was the mention of the "Losada Line", a lower boundary on the ratio of positive to negative interactions, above which teams "flourish" and below which they "languish."  Remind anyone of the guidance that instances of positive/affirming feedback greatly outnumber those of negative/adjusting feedback?

I'm always pleased to see MT recommendations backed up by psychological and social psychological research.

Submitted by Falk Bruegmann on Tuesday June 12th, 2012 12:09 pm

Thanks for the links, very interesting!
Another wiki page, linked from the one you referred to, gives the P/N (positivity/negativity ratios) found in differently performing teams:
"In Marcial Losada's study, high performance teams had a P/N ratio of 5.6; medium performance teams a P/N of 1.9 and low performance teams a P/N of 0.36 (there was more negativity than positivity)."
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivity/negativity_ratio)
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Falk Bruegmann
3-6-4-7

Submitted by Dr Gabriel Aidra on Thursday June 14th, 2012 2:46 am

I watched the Milgram experiment as a high school student and it had a dramatic impact on my life. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen and is the reason I got into psych. (Link to the original video, >130megs... Right click/save target as)
Spoiler alert:
As part of the experiment, the volunteer was asked to deliver electric shocks of increasing intensity when the other volunteer (whom they could not see) got a certain question wrong. Eventually the shocks got to high that the man being shocked started screaming in pain and pleading for them to stop.
The volunteers would look questioningly at the experimenter (who was standing over them with a white coat). The experimenter responded with "You must do this" & "You have no choice" and that was enough to convince over 2/3rds of the volunteers to give LETHAL shocks!
That scene will remain forever etched into my mind, and I actually became a little bit of a misanthrope until I came across Losada's work many years later.
Thank you so much MPOMRANING for sharing and I actually think that Mark & Mike should do a podcast specifically on this.
Talking of Mark & Mike, (& with my Dr. hat on) everything I've heard them say has been very psychologically sound which is why I'm such a fanatical follower.
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gabriel
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