Recently, I made an effort to disentangle my thoughts on critical thinking. One of the key components of critical thinking revolves around the idea of embracing failure and reframing it in a positive way. My mantra for this idea is that there is no failure, only feedback. However, failure can be devastating when it happens and one of the ways we are made aware of our failures is through criticism.

Criticism can be difficult to swallow. Especially when it’s valid and even more so when it comes from someone you respect or admire. This is true even if the criticism is constructive and comes from an empathetic point of view. But why?

In this post I aim to organize my thoughts on criticism, why it can be hard to swallow regardless of its empathetic intended purpose, and provide a schema for conceptualizing and taking criticism to correct one’s behavior to foster personal development.

A few caveats are in order though:

• – I will be working from the presupposition that the criticism is intended to be constructive.
• – I will not however necessarily assume that it is delivered constructively, although I do not presuppose malice.

But to generate a schema for conceptualizing criticism, we must first lay out a working model of compliments and define the nature of social interactions.

The nature of social interactions

Social niceties

In a functioning society, people are generally nice to one another. For instance, when the store clerk asks you how you’re doing today as they ring your groceries up, social norms dictate that you respond by telling them that you’re doing good. You might even throw in a smile and wish them a nice day before going your merry way. The store clerk, ceteris paribus¹, has no interest in how your day is actually going; they are just showing you common courtesy. Therefore it would come across as strange if you were to tell them that you’re actually feeling horrible, that you missed your bus on your way to work, had a huge fight with your wife, and to top it all off, that your boss scolded you for being late.

No. You simply smile and tell them that you’re doing good and bid them good day before parting with them and exiting the store. Social norms like this are what social psychologists refer to as injuctive norms. They can be thought of as invisible rules that we all follow.²

Compliments

Another thing we humans like to do is to give compliments to each other for that which we find attractive. This can be a physical quality, task persistence, or hard work and effort; something that catches our eye and we find admirable or praise worthy. Compliments signal respect and/or admiration and serve to strengthen social bonds.

However, social norms dictate that we don’t bask in the glory of an achievement for too long and that we should definitely not take take too much pride in the compliment itself. Although taking pride in one’s achievements is socially acceptable (and quite honestly an attractive quality when employed appropriately), many people struggle with praise and do their best to minimize their achievements if complimented for them.

This has annoying repercussions. It can make the person whom went out of their way to notice something admirable you did to feel invalidated because you minimized their opinion of you. Furthermore, doing so can cause you to feel like your achievement wasn’t that big of a deal anyways. The reason for this is that the way we speak to ourselves (our self-talk) has a profound impact on our view of ourselves, our achievements, and shapes our perceptual framework for understanding our own mental world. In other words, the way we use language shapes our thoughts, and as a consequence our self-identity.

How to take compliments

I have already alluded to the fact that praise and complements are another person’s opinion of you or something you did. The keyword here is opinion.

In contrast to facts, opinions are just a view or judgement formed about something. They are not necessarily based on fact kr knowledge, they simply are someone else’s viewpoint. As such, they may or may not be true… and truthfully, that does not matter.

The fact is that if you receive a compliment, then that means that someone went out of their way to let you know about something you did that they found attractive, admirable, or desirable. And they should be taken exactly like that; as a nice gesture.

Therefore, whatever your own opinion of what you received a compliment for is, the appropriate response is to smile and say thank you. You don’t have to agree with the compliment, but similarly to how you wouldn’t tell the store clerk about your horrid day and the fight you had with your wife, it is disadvantageous to minimize the compliment someone gave you.

Imagine for example that a colleague  tells you that you did a great job presenting the latest sales numbers at the corporate meeting. If you go on and on about all the different reasons for why you feel you did not do a great job, that this and that could have been presented better, and tell them that you know it wasn’t that great because you didn’t spend as much time preparing as you would have liked to, you end up invalidating their viewpoint and probably feel worse about your performance then you did before receiving the compliment. It truly is a lose-lose situation.

If you receive a compliment, simply smile and say your thanks!

Criticism

Like compliments, criticism is an opinion of you. It may or may not be true, but assuming good intentions, the person criticizing you went out of their way to provide you with corrective feedback.

However, while compliments can make you feel good about yourself, a critical comment can sting you right to the core. Especially if you know that there is some truth to it. The urge to justify your actions when faced with critical feedback may be even stronger when you receive criticism than when you receive praise. Nonetheless, the best course of action remains the same; smile and thank the person for their input and then go about our day.

What can happen if you constantly provide people with justifications for your actions when they criticize you is that you run the risk of coming across as excusatory and unwilling to take responsibility for your actions. What’s worse is that if you do this enough times, people will simply stop bothering with providing you with corrective feedback (which is essentially what criticism is, when delivered constructively or with good intentions). Although that may sound good in the short-term, the long-term effects of not having one’s actions corrected can lead to social exclusion. The fact is that we need other people to help us regulate our actions (including emotions). The world is infinitely complex and without other people to help us navigate it through corrective feedback, it is not self-evident that we’d manage it!

Summary

The environment is infinitely more complex than any single individual can manage alone, and as a result, much of internal behavior regulation is outsourced to other people. Indeed, people often lack insight into their own emotional responses, leading to a misattribution of an event, which in turn highlights the importance of social regulation. Moreover, effective emotion regulation is critical for mental health, social functioning, and well-being; trying to do so in isolation is no small task.

Compliments and criticism are other people’s opinion of you or something you did. They are not facts. Having the ability to receive compliments and critical feedback is essential for our ability to navigate the social realm. Conveniently, both compliments and criticism can be handled with the same behavioral script. Just smile, say thank you, and then independently evaluate the merits of these opinions; keep what’s valid and throw out the rest. Then reiterate through this process, employing the principles of critical thinking along the way!

1. Ceteris paribus is a Latin phrase, meaning “other things equal”. ↩︎
2. Well maybe not all, but most people follow these prescriptive norms. They make interacting with others easier, although there are caveats to this; for instance neurodivergent individuals sometimes struggle with picking up the social signals that elicit the behavioral script associated with prescriptive norms of this kind. ↩︎