Research has shown that people share their failures much more often than their successes
When someone tells us about a failure they’ve experienced, we’re quite likely to respond by sharing a similar experience of our own. Conversely, when a friend tells us about a difficult time, we may hesitate to immediately tell them about our own successes. Why is that? New research published in *Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes* suggests that the answer may lie in our effort to protect others’ feelings.
Shared Successes vs. Shared Failures
The research team conducted nine studies involving a total of 8,229 people. The researchers examined how the way we share personal information changes when we first learn what has happened to the person we’re talking to.
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In one of the experiments, participants were asked to imagine that they had received positive or negative results from a biological age test. They were then told that a colleague of theirs had also experienced success or failure.
The results showed that people tended to “align” with the other person’s experience. But there was one significant difference: shared failures were reported much more frequently than shared successes.
Failure can be a way to connect
The researchers found that when two people face a similar failure, they are more likely to talk openly about it. This does not seem to be done necessarily to compare their performance, but to offer each other a sense of understanding and solidarity.
In fact, when participants liked the other person more, this tendency was even stronger. They explained that they shared their own failures to make their conversation partner feel better.
When Our Own Successes Can Be Hurtful
The opposite was true when someone had failed and we had a success to share. Participants often hesitated to mention it, used an apologetic tone, or prefaced it with words of support. In some cases, in fact, some people would conceal or downplay their own success so as not to make the other person feel worse.
We don’t always want to show that we’re doing well
The most interesting finding of the study is that this behavior doesn’t seem to be solely about the image we want to project of ourselves. We often tailor what we say with the person we’re talking to in mind, thinking about how they’ll feel.
And this was confirmed even in real online conversations. When both participants had failed, 96% shared their failure, while when both had succeeded, the corresponding percentage was 73%.
Source: in.gr
