So often these kinds of interactions that take the form of what I'll call "anxious niceness," they involve a lot of compliments, telling people what they do well in a very general, non-specific way. But a lot of my work actually looks at what's it like to be on the receiving end of these types of interactions. How do you feel when you interact with someone over and over again who's giving off these kinds of brittle smiles?

shows examples for such facial expressions

After a lifetime of interacting with someone who engages in anxious niceness, what we find is that most people on the receiving end are racial minorities. They are disadvantaged group members, they are the type of people that we are worried about appearing prejudiced in front of, and that anxiety is regulated by being over-the-top nice to these folks. We also find that these individuals tend to be more synchronized to and attentive to the how-we-say-it piece, than the what-we-say part.

So in one study, we had black and white Americans interact with each other in a cross-race interaction, and we brought them into the lab and we measured the physiology of both partners. What this allowed us to do is capture the degree to which people stress. Those under-the-skin responses can actually be caught by their partners. And what we expected to find is that the black participants would become more synchronized physiologically to those whites. They'd be more attuned to those non-verbal signals of anxiety.

And that's exactly what we found. The more anxious those white participants appeared, the more they fidgeted, the more they avoided eye contact, even the higher their cortisol reactivity, indicating some real deep under-the-skin stress response, the more those black participants became linked up to them over time. And I think this finding is a little bit terrifying.

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Now often what we find is the type of feedback that people are actually getting isn't always super direct. Sometimes it's a little bit patronizing.

So you could probably see where I'm going with this. Having over-the-top positive nice feedback can harm your performance, it can make it very difficult for you to climb up, difficult to know where you stand, what you should do better, what you should stop doing, but can also damage people in ways that we often don't think about. It can affect their reputations outside of the interaction context.

So imagine the case that you're one of these people who loves giving this general, nice feedback, and you have someone who works for you, and a recruiter calls, maybe a past employee, or someone asks you for a letter of recommendation, the kinds of things you're going to put are going to be like, "They're a real team player," "They have great energy at work!," generic things. Yes, they're nice, but they are not very telling about what that person is really like.

And what we find is that the readers of these things, at best, think to themselves, "Wow, they must not really know this person at all. I don't even know what this means." At worst, they think to themselves, "Well, they probably have some real opinions. They're just afraid to share them." So these kinds of general positive feedback tend to actually harm people's reputation when they're not backed up with real data.

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What I've found is that for every one person who loves this kind of general, generic, nice feedback, there's another person who feels like it's lazy, who feels like it's not helpful. And I actually learned this lesson the hard way from one of my students recently. She was giving a practice talk in my lab, and she spent weeks and weeks preparing it, probably harder than anyone else I'd ever seen on preparing a talk like this.

And then she went and gave it, and she came back and I said, "How did the talk go? Did it go well?" She said, "It was terrible. It was horrible. It was the worst experience." I said, "Well, what happened?" And she said, "All I got were a bunch of 'Great jobs', 'That was interesting' and then some clap emojis from the people on Zoom. Not a single person asked a tough question," she said.

And I had this moment where I realized that positive feedback can come across as lazy feedback. It can come across as disengaged feedback.