Does being harsh make criticism more effective?

No. It delivers the same correction and charges you extra for it.

Alexander Czopp, Margo Monteith and Aimee Mark tested exactly this in the first of three experiments. Participants were confronted about stereotyped responses they had just given, and the confrontations were varied deliberately — some mild, some hostile. Both versions reduced stereotyped responding afterward.

What hostility did change was the confronter's own standing. People who got the sharp version came away angrier at the person who corrected them, and no better corrected. So the edge is not the active ingredient. It is a surcharge, and you pay it out of an account you will need again.

Because it buys something real, just not the thing you were aiming at.

An edge raises the price of continuing to disagree with you, and most people would rather stop arguing than pay it. The conversation ends on your terms, which from the inside is very hard to tell apart from having changed someone's mind.

Pressure can also run backwards. Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht found that anti-prejudice messaging which leaned on the external requirement to comply produced more prejudice than running no intervention at all, while messaging that engaged people's own reasons reduced it.

You usually find out which one you got about a week later, by whether the thing changed or only went quiet around you.

No, and this is the part of the finding that gets skipped. In the mild condition the correction was fully delivered. The person was told plainly that what they had just done was a problem. Only the tone changed. The point was still made.

Clarity and contempt come apart more easily than people assume. What you give up when you drop the edge is not the content — it is the verdict about the person that was riding along with it. That landed badly and I need it to stop says the entire thing. It just doesn't also say and you're the sort of person who would.

The second clause is the one that gets remembered, and in couples research it is the strongest predictor of divorce.

Say the whole hard thing and leave the verdict off it. The content of a correction and your assessment of the person receiving it are separable, and only one of them was ever doing the work.

The four moves, in order → How to correct someone without making them defensive