How to Complain Productively

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all know people who perpetually see the glass as half empty. They can find something wrong in every situation.

The potatoes are hard. The beef is tough.

Other people have it easy. Other places are nicer. Other times were better. I'm a grumpy old man.

I don't like everything the way it is now compared to the way it used to be.

These people see the world through dirt-stained glasses, and the glasses are scratched, and they were the wrong prescription anyway.

Oh, and here's $65 for your budget. Oh, and here are 4 idiots who'll do nothing but weigh you down. Oh, and your cat's still dead.

Researchers, counselors, and motivational speakers have examined the effects of these attitudes on our relationships and well-being.

Complaining is damaging to our health, it's destructive to our relationships, and it limits your career success.

But if complaining is so bad for us, why is it so ubiquitous? Does it serve a psychological purpose? Does it have benefits? This week on Hidden Brain, the psychology of complaining— why we do it, the effects it has on those around us, and how we can learn to complain more effectively. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings. And if you're a parent, you can change your teen's account settings settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Thank you for having me.

Mike, I want to take you back to your days as a PhD student. I understand there was an administrator in your program who, let's say, you didn't quite get along with. What did the administrator do that rankled you?

So I was a second-year PhD student in a pass/fail class that provided us with teaching tips, which I was going to start doing the following year. And one of the assignments was to give a 15-minute presentation on a topic of our choice. And that was the only instruction we were given. So I wanted to get a head start on my teaching prep. So I wanted to present on a portion of the trust, justice, and ethics chapter from the organizational behavior class that I would be teaching. And as best practices, the students and faculty suggested that new teachers ask others for their teaching materials and then personalize them.

So Mike went to a new assistant professor, Jessica Rodell. He explained the assignment.

And she then gave me her slides, which were tweaks of the slides that the textbook publisher provides to all teachers. At that point, I then changed 80 to 90% of the slide content. And the only content I retained was the definitions of key terms which matched the textbook I'd be teaching from. So after we presented, the teacher pulls me aside at the end of the class, and he starts off by saying that my presentation was too good, so I must have plagiarized it. And I didn't think I'd done anything wrong, and I still don't, so I gave him the full story. He then told me this was a serious issue, and he'd talk with my advisor. So I then showed my advisor the slides that I started with, as well as the slides that I presented. And he agreed that the only similarities were the definitions. And he was the author of the textbook that I was teaching from, as well as the creator of the slides. So he was— he had some pretty strong familiarity with the content. So ultimately, my department stood up for me and the administrator dropped the issue after a lot of huffing and puffing.

But Mike found that he couldn't drop the issue. It rankled him to have been accused of unethical behavior. And very soon, he found someone else in his corner.

So because Jessica had been implicated in this same situation, because she initially gave me the slides, and the administrator also wanted to talk to her about what had happened, which ended up being, you know, a hassle for her. And she was also I don't know if the word outraged is the right level, but she was certainly upset that she was being accused of something for simply engaging in the best practices that we're told to do as PhD students. And so although the issue had technically gone away and it wasn't a problem anymore, almost every time that Jessica and I talked, and we talked regularly to meet for research ideas, we rehashed this experience. We complained about the administrator, the accusations, the hassle we'd went through, and it invariably led us to complain about other things we didn't like about this person, which was a pretty long list. And this went on for weeks.

Very quickly, Mike and Jessica's complaints about the administrator became a standard part of their conversational repertoire.

Anytime I passed by her office, we would start chatting. And for several weeks after this unfair experience, it would just keep coming up and keep coming up.

Like actors perfecting their lines, they would each rehearse their respective complaints. And the more they complained, the more they complained.

We were absolutely egging one another along. I don't know if we were trying to one-up each other, but we definitely wanted confirmation that we had been wronged. And so in that situation, it became this opportunity for us to make sure that we were correct. And unfortunately, it also made us angrier.

The angrier Mike got, the colder he became every time he was around the administrator.

I really didn't have a positive attitude towards him. I never said anything rude. I never did anything that way. But there was definitely this distancing. that was happening, and I certainly wasn't doing a great job hiding my emotions. And it was something that he noticed.

Mike's view of the administrator narrowed. With his tunnel vision, he could see nothing good about this person, nothing of value. It was only in retrospect that he realized his anger probably kept him from getting the administrator's help on important matters and kept him from learning from a senior scholar.

This person was a member of our department, and they were also the associate dean over allocations of PhD student office space, funding, travel. This person was also a very accomplished researcher, and there might have been opportunities to collaborate with them on effective research projects, and so it's hard to know what was going through in his mind, but certainly He would sense my dislike.

I'm thinking, Mike, as you're talking, that what would happen to you in this micro instance is now happening actually on a much more macro scale. When I think about social media platforms now, I feel like there are some platforms that are almost entirely devoted to the art of complaining and to receiving solidarity from other people in the accuracy or the legitimacy of your complaints. Can you talk about that idea for a moment, that what used to be, I'm unhappy with someone, so I I talk to someone else about it. I receive interpersonal solidarity as I'm doing it. This is what you and Jessica were doing, has now become something that actually is multiplied on a much larger scale where people are expressing complaints and expecting, in some ways, to get reinforcements from others.

We want people to agree with us. There was an experience I had where there was a funding decision that was made by our department head. A couple years ago, and I disagreed with it, and so I texted a friend who was outside of my department to complain about it, and his response was to point out that maybe I had seen the situation differently, and maybe the department head was trying to make sure that the needs of multiple people within the department were met. Well, that wasn't what I wanted to hear. I wanted somebody to agree with me that I had been wronged. And so I stopped that text chain and texted another person within my department, and the situation repeated itself. He suggested that perhaps I was mistaken and I might want to think about it differently and that things would work out. Again, I thought, don't these people realize what I'm looking for here? And so I texted a third person, and this person agreed. Yeah, you were definitely screwed in that situation. And I thought, victory! I got what I wanted. Now, after 5 minutes, I went, oh, I have been an idiot here, and I realized that what I really needed was to hear people reframe the situation and point out to me that I was perhaps mistaken. There was another way to look at it, but we have this inherent desire to want to be agreed with when something bad happens to us, and that's how we get in these echo chambers in these social media platforms where we avoid areas where we'll hear something that suggests there's another way to look at the situation.

I want to flag that when we reach out to others for commiseration, and we're basically getting— want others to agree with us, invariably, this involves something negative that we're saying about a third party. We rarely reach out to seek commiseration when we have something positive to say about a third party. The net effect of this, whether that's on an individual interpersonal level or whether it's on a global level on a social media platform is that the amount of negativity that's then being shared is amplified just because we selectively focus on the negative rather than the positive. Can you talk about this idea that this has, in some ways, a corrosive effect? Because it's not like we're sharing all the things that are happening to us. We're selectively sharing the things that are negative.

It's a great insight. With my MBA students, I frequently ask, who here has more positive interactions with their supervisor than negative ones? And basically everybody in the class raises their hand, and then I ask, who would agree that more than 90% of your interactions with your supervisor are positive? Again, most of the class raises their hand except that's not what we talk about when people say, what was your day like? We focus on the 5% or 10% of our day that was negative, or when we were treated Unfairly, and it gives a biased picture to other people and to ourselves of what our day was like and even what our supervisors are like, and it can help to remember that supervisors aren't perfect, and if you're a supervisor, you're not going to be perfect. There invariably will be these negative interactions, but when we are focused on the unfairness experiences rather than the fairness— It's almost in our mind that we start to think that our supervisors are more unfair than they actually are.

Chances are you've experienced this yourself. Maybe your boss tells you to stay late one day. You complain to a coworker and feel a sense of relief. The next time your boss does something frustrating, you vent again and again. It feels good to complain about our negative experiences, And most of us do it without giving it any thought. That's what Mike and Jessica did for weeks after the bad interaction with the administrator. And then one day, they had a flash of epiphany.

One day when we sat down— this was probably about 4 weeks after this had happened— the administrator came up again. He had done something that affected the department and Jessica in a different way. And as we started to complain, we almost at the same time looked at each other, stopped, and said, this isn't helping, is it? And our next thought was, this would make a great research project.

There's a second idea that I think is a subtext to what you've been telling me the last few minutes, and it's a really important subtext to draw attention to because it's so intuitively obvious that I think we don't stop to think about it, which is most of us actually believe that talking to someone else about the things that upset us is a good thing. And most of the people we talk with, they believe that us talking to them is also a good thing. Can you just talk about this idea that there is a widespread intuitive belief that talking helps?

Absolutely. In fact, that is what prompted this research study, is we dug into the literature. And almost all of it suggests that talking about our negative feelings or bad things that have happened to us helps us. But as we dug deeper, we realized that most of this research looks at how people reported that they felt immediately after the event. And there are studies that show between 80 and 90% believe that the experience helped and that they would do it again. The research would also look at what are the emotions in the 5 minutes after sharing that experience, and often what we focus on when we think, oh, it helped, is because we're thinking about the fact that my relationship with the listener got better, and it does. It improves our relationship to feel that we are supported and that we are listened to, but there's another party in this equation that gets ignored, and that is the supervisor, which is why we wanted to dig more into Are people actually harming themselves in terms of that relationship with the boss and their work outcomes and trading that away for this momentary feeling of, oh, I get a little bit of relief and I feel like somebody agrees with me?

Do the short-term emotional benefits of complaining detract from long-term well-being? And as we listen sympathetically when others complain to us, Are we actually helping or hurting? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy. And that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, Or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Complaining can be cathartic. It can also be fun. It's a way for us to express how we feel and to get others to back us up. Social media has amplified our avenues to complain. You could argue there are entire social media platforms that are principally devoted to complaining. Most of us have a positive view of sharing our concerns with others. We think it allows us to speak up, fight back, stand up for ourselves. At Arizona State University, Mike Baer believed those things too. Then he started looking at the data. Mike, you conducted a study on bus drivers in London asking about their workplace complaints. Can you tell me what kind of complaints they told you they had about their supervisors?

A lot of their complaints focused on how they felt that the supervisors would take the customer's side In when there was a complaint. So one driver remarked, we're treated with contempt. The customer is not always right. We have several managerial staff who can't even drive a car, let alone a bus, try and tell us how to do our job. I've been doing this job for almost 15 years and never had an accident of any kind. I never take time off work, but this is never taken into account. But if I look at someone sideways, I get called into the manager. I need to get this off my chest. I'm doing it now, and I'll share this with other drivers who I value.

Like many research projects, this one got started as a result of chance. One of Mike's co-authors was working with him on a project looking at trust. She was hanging out at a bus depot in Britain and got to overhearing the bus drivers talk.

She just sat and listened to the bus drivers and the experience that they have. And she came back to us, and she remarked, this is an interesting group. They like to whinge and complain almost constantly while they're in the depots to each other over lunch or breaks or shift changes, and this comment came at a time when Jessica and I were thinking about doing this research project on unfairness talk, and we thought, this is perfect, and so having been prompted and realizing that this was an environment, a workplace where complaining was very common, we thought, let's switch and focus on looking at these bus drivers and the effect of their complaining to their coworkers.

As you were talking just now, I was trying to count up the number of different workplaces I've been working at, Mike, over the years. And I count 5 different workplaces before my current job. And I feel like at every one of those workplaces, there were just these elaborate rituals where people would complain about the managers. And it was almost an art form in some of the workplaces that I was at where people would describe in really elaborate ways all the ways in which their managers did something wrong. So what the bus drivers were doing in London is hardly an aberration or hardly unique.

I've had the exact same experience. It's almost like a rite of passage that this is how we build relationships with our coworkers. Oh, did you get screwed over by the boss? Me too. Let me tell you about it. And we bond over these negative experiences. Almost— I had a friend who was in the military. He was in the Navy, and he worked on a submarine, and he said that the people who would not complain about the boss were ostracized. You know, they weren't part of the group if they wouldn't get involved in these complaining situations, and so I can imagine a situation in which you may not actually agree that the supervisor has been unfair, But you don't want to be the part of the outgroup in that situation. You want to be pulling yourself into that ingroup.

So you had this group of employees who have complaints about their supervisors. And it's worth stipulating here, of course, that some of these complaints might have been entirely legitimate. There might indeed have been supervisors who were acting in abusive ways or disrespectful ways. But you followed these employees over time. And what were you hoping to measure? What were you looking to measure about their mental health or their well-being?

So we first measured the extent to which they talked to their coworkers about unfair experiences. Then 6 weeks later, we came back and we measured the extent to which they felt anger towards their supervisor, or when they thought about the relationship with their supervisor, that they felt hope. At the same time, we also measured the extent to which they sensed a feeling of forgiveness toward their supervisor for any unfairness that might have happened. Then several weeks later, we looked at supervisors' ratings of the extent to which these employees went out of their way to help them, to do extra work, to volunteer, and this is all voluntary work. That's what we could look at called citizenship behavior, and it's a way to look at whether the relationship between employee and supervisor is strong. If you like and have a good relationship, you tend to help, and if you don't, you tend not to help. And the reason we looked at anger and hope is that anger stems from an appraisal that somebody has hindered my goal achievement and that they are to blame. And hope is this belief that although there is a situation that is negative, I think that it can be fixed. I'm willing to move forward. It's an approach emotion, whereas anger, the tendency when we feel anger is to attack. Now at work, employees are unlikely to overtly attack the supervisor, but a more subtle way to do that is by distancing themselves, and you kind of get back by not going above and beyond.

What did you find in terms of the effects of complaining on hope and anger and forgiveness?

We found that those employees, as unfairness talk went up, that their feelings of anger also went up and their feelings of hope went down. Now, the importance of that is, as anger went up, forgiveness went down. And as hope goes up, forgiveness goes up. But because hope was decreasing, It was also decreasing the amount of forgiveness. So ultimately, we found that the more that employees talked about unfairness, the less likely they were to forgive the supervisor for any unfair actions.

Why do you think this was happening, Mike? Because again, at an intuitive level, it feels— there's the old proverb, a problem shared is a problem halved, the idea that when we share our problems, they are reduced. Why do you think that was not happening here?

When you share a sense of unfairness, to some extent you are looking for them to confirm your interpretation of the event. At the moment, you're not really sure whether or not it was unfair or not. You're not sure whether there is a solution or a way forward. The more you talk about it, you're rehashing that event. It's making those negative feelings come to the forefront. Every time you talk about it, you're reliving the fact that someone treated you negatively. And so let's say you don't talk about the unfair event. Well, after a period of 4, 5, 6 weeks, it may have receded into the background. But if you have continually brought that up and rehashed that event, it's fresh in your mind, almost as if it happened yesterday.

So you found that the extent of complaining was a strong predictor of the increase in anger and a decrease in What did you find in terms of the effects of complaining on people being good stewards and citizens in their workplace?

So we found that as forgiveness went down, so did employees' willingness to be good citizens within the workplace. They volunteered to help those supervisors less. And this was observed behavior from the supervisors. They didn't know that we were investigating unfairness. They didn't know that we were investigating the extent to which their employees were forgiving them. All that they were doing was rating the employees' behavior And we found a strong correlation between employees' unwillingness to forgive the supervisors and a decrease in their citizenship behavior.

I mean, in some ways, this has parallels with the story that you told about the time when you were in a PhD program, Mike. I mean, the experience you had with your administrator almost eerily parallels exactly what happened with the London bus drivers.

That's exactly right. I think most of the time we don't even realize that we are distancing ourselves from others to whom we have negative feelings. If you told employees that their distancing and lack of forgiveness was actually hurting their performance ratings, they would probably be surprised. They would probably think, oh, my supervisor doesn't realize that I'm distancing myself or I'm mad. I do a great job hiding it. But we actually do a very bad job of hiding our emotions towards the people around us. When we harbor negative emotions or we don't think that that relationship can improve, we are going to invariably pull back from that relationship.

So there's a paradox here, Mike, which is, on the one hand, if something wrong happens to us, if someone treats us badly, if someone behaves abusively towards us, it seems really problematic to say, don't talk about this to anyone, don't share any of this with anyone, keep it to yourself. In 5 weeks, you're going to forget it. I mean, that doesn't seem like very healthy advice. On the other hand, you're also saying that when we talk about it with others and complain about it to others, it often doesn't lead to very good, positive outcomes. Is there a solution to this paradox, to this conundrum?

That's a great insight, because we would never suggest that you shouldn't talk about bad things that have happened, certainly when they rise to the level So the solution here is, who are you talking to? And our natural inclination is to talk to people who agree with us, who commiserate with us, who point out that we were wronged. But we also, in this study and another experiment, we looked at to what extent does the listener impact our outcomes with the supervisor. And what we found is when you Talk to someone who reframes the situation, who points out that there are solutions, who suggests that maybe you should look at it from the supervisor's perspective, that the positive effect on anger and the negative effect on hope, those go away. And so essentially, having someone tell you that there are solutions to your problem gets rid of the negative effects of talking about unfairness.

Just to take you back to the example that you gave me, Mike, when you went to Jessica and let's say you told Jessica about the problem you were having with your administrator, what would have been the response that she could have given you that in some ways might have led to a more positive outcome for you and for Jessica and perhaps for the administrator as well?

In that situation, I think it would have been helpful for Jessica to point out the importance of having a good relationship with that administrator, of pointing out all the different ways in which they would affect my PhD career, and pointing out that ensuring a good relationship with that administrator would ultimately be helpful to me. It also would have been helpful to hear that things had the possibility of getting better. That this was an isolated situation, that perhaps the administrators saw it in this particular way. And after having it discussed with them, perhaps they would see my side of the story.

So there's, again, something of a paradox here, Mike, which is that when we reach out to others for help, we're actually not looking for someone to reframe the problem for us. As you yourself mentioned some time ago, when you had a problem and you found someone who tried to reframe the problem to you, you promptly ended the text chain and went to somebody else who basically Reinforced what it is that you wanted to hear. Can you talk a little bit about what reframing actually is doing? Is it merely a strategic tactic to tell us, this is not the smart thing to do? What is the purpose of reframing, do you think?

What we focused on with reframing is the other person helping us see the bigger picture, to see the other person's side, to see why they acted the way they did, or why they thought the way they did, or why they made a particular decision. An example I have that illustrates this is my first job out of high school was construction, and I was framing houses, and it was a hard job. I didn't know what I was doing. I was lifting wood all day. It was 100+ degrees, and the work didn't slow down to teach me these skills, and the first week on the job I shot myself in the thumb with a nail gun.

Oh my God.

And my boss came over, And he looked at it. He handed me a roll of duct tape, told me to tape it up, and we got back to work. And after about a week of this, I thought, man, I can't do this. Boss doesn't care. The boss is being unfair. The boss isn't looking at what I need. And so I called my dad, and I started complaining, and he listened to me fairly silently for about 5 minutes, and then he stopped me, and he said, are you going to quit? And I said, no, I need this job. I want to be a construction manager, and I also need the money. And he said, then stop complaining and figure it out. And I learned 2 important lessons that day. One, don't go to my dad for emotional support. And 2, if the situation was going to get better, it was up to me. And here I was complaining about this boss being unfair instead of looking at this boss had deadlines, this was my job, this is what I was getting paid for. And when he said that, my whole mentality flipped and I stopped seeing the experience as unfair. I stopped seeing the boss as unfair and I saw it as an opportunity. And it completely changed my mentality as I went to work and how I reacted with that supervisor. And that supervisor ended up being one of my best friends, and we actually became business partners and went off and started our own construction company together. And I can look back and point to the day and the phone call of when that relationship improved, and it was because my dad gave me a reframing response even though I thought I wanted an agreement. The takeaway when I talk to people about unfairness is Not that they shouldn't complain, is they should be very selective about who they complain to. Our advice is that people should go out and search for people who perhaps have the courage to reframe when we're complaining to them. They will help us to see the bigger picture, who don't just agree that we've been wronged. There certainly are situations in which we have been wronged, but even in those situations, seeing the bigger picture and helping understand what we can do to move forward will invariably be helpful.

There's a tension here, Mike, between what I think makes short-term emotional sense for us and what might make long-term emotional sense for us. And that's the picture I'm really gathering from this research, which is on a short-term basis, I am looking for agreement, commiseration, and perhaps most importantly, validation. From a long-term perspective, My emotional health might be better served by someone who says, here's the bigger picture. Here's one way of thinking about it that you didn't consider before. Think about the long view. Are these 2 points of view in tension with one another?

I think they are a bit in tension. If I was speaking to listeners and people who are responding to somebody complaining about unfairness, I would suggest that they start with, Some level of agreement to indicating to the person who's complaining that there are elements that were unfair of what they're talking about, but I would also advise them not to get stuck on those experiences. I would encourage them to shift rather quickly from, you know, you're right, the boss was terrible, to, have you thought about ways Of moving forward? Have you thought about how you might fix this situation? Have you thought about your role and what you could have done better? And if you're able to find somebody who can do that effectively, you're getting that validation while also getting that helpful advice that allows you to move on from that negative situation. Now, that requires a lot of skill from the listener, of course, But I've certainly been able to find those people in my own life, which has required me to actively go out and search people who don't just agree with me.

So, Mike, I'm wondering, you've done all this research that basically has analyzed the effects of complaining and how we can complain better and how we can find people in some ways who can help us reframe our complaints to the positive. I'm wondering if you've actually taken this advice to heart yourself. Do you have a time in your life when you've come up with something or someone has really bothered you or done something that's really upset you, and you've managed to find people who don't merely mirror how you're feeling, but actually help you see the bigger picture?

Absolutely. This happened just about a month ago. I was working on a research project that we had submitted to a journal, and we had gotten back the reviews from the editor and the reviewers. And we got a revise and resubmit. A revise and resubmit is instructions from an editor and reviewers who tell us the changes they would like to be made to the paper, and if you make these changes, they will then review it again and decide whether or not the paper has reached the level of quality and interest for the readers of that journal, and as part of this revise and resubmit, one of the reviewers had made some comments that I didn't agree with, and to indicate my level of disagreement as I was going through the paper, you know, we often use these headings when we respond to each reviewer, and it will say for example responses to reviewer 1. 1's comments, and I changed the heading to responses to reviewer 1's random musings and terrible requests. And 2 of my co-authors on the project just laughed and agreed with my complaints as I went through, so I could see in the Word doc that I would make a complaint or a comment about the viability and often stupidity of some of these comments, and they would add their comment. I agree. This is a terrible comment. I can't believe that they're making this request. Have they— is this a first-year PhD student making these requests? And we just played off of each other. And then one of my co-authors who I've worked with multiple times, and I love working with her partially because of what she did next, her comments then said, you're right. I could see why you feel this way about this comment. However, let's think about it from a different perspective. Rather than making a bad request, maybe they just didn't understand what we meant. And so let's take it down a couple notches and focus on what can we do to accurately respond to this reviewer. And so as I read through and looked at her reframing responses, I was more easily able to see what that reviewer was asking. And so I had interpreted their comments as unfair and bad requests, but when this co-author reframed for me, I was able to see, actually, those are viable requests. The change that that has when you're writing a revision is huge. You treat the reviewer as a help rather than a hindrance. It changes the tone with which you write. It changes your willingness to go above and beyond to respond to their comments. And ultimately, whenever you're able to do that, it makes the revision better.

You know, Mike, as you're talking, I'm realizing that there is another element here, which is that when many of us complain— and I feel like I have done this very often in numerous workplaces where I've worked— complaining about people gives you a feeling like you're being agentic, that you're actually doing something about something that's bothering you. But the net effect of complaining often is that you're just stewing in something that happened. And you're hearing somebody else stew in the same kinds of complaints. And nothing actually gets done. Nobody actually does anything with those complaints afterwards. And I think what you're suggesting is that when someone reframes a complaint for us and helps to point a way forward, part of what they're doing actually is giving us back the gift of agency, of actually telling us there is something in this scenario that actually is within your power to do. And of course, as that old proverb says, the wisdom lies in knowing the difference between the things you cannot change and the things you can. And of course, once someone tells you share something that you can do, it makes all the difference in the world.

You've just got to the heart of this whole research project. You nailed it. Is when we are complaining, we are increasing the extent to which we see things with an external locus of control. We are essentially saying the world happens to me and there's nothing I can do about it. When we talk to somebody who reframes, They're helping us give us that internal locus of control, helping us see that we are an agent, that there are ways to move forward to fix the situation. For me, it's a very empowering experience to hear someone reframe the situation because now I can do something about the negative experience. When somebody agrees with us, we lose all power over the situation. We have to wait for the supervisor to change. for things to get better. But when it's reframed for us, now we can go out and fix the situation.

Mike's research shows that when someone voices their complaints to us about a third party, simply agreeing with them may be the easiest path, but it is not the most helpful path. If you really care about the other person, your fundamental job is to help them see the big picture And to see that they themselves may have power to make the problem better. When we come back, a series of techniques that can make us vastly more effective in getting our complaints heard and resolved. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Complaining can affect our emotional states, our relationships, and our work. At Clemson University in South Carolina, psychologist Robin Kowalski has found that one of the biggest shortcomings in the way we complain is that most of us do it unthinkingly. Robin and other researchers have developed a taxonomy of complaining. Broadly speaking, there are 2 ways to complain. Most of us choose the path of what is called expressive complaining.

Expressive complaints are literally what they sound like. They're complaints where you are just expressing your dissatisfaction, whether you truly feel dissatisfied or not. Think of it as like cathartic complaining. So, you know, I may be driving down the road, and this actually happened to me today. I was driving down the road and somebody was right on my tail, and that makes me nervous. What if I have to hit the brakes or then they would hit me? So I'm having some complaints about that person. Now, that's not going to change their behavior. They can't hear me. I was not gesturing. I was not complaining that way, but it's not going to change that person. It did make me feel better though. It made me feel better to just be able to express because it was making me tense and it reduced my tension to be able to just mouth off in the car. So it's cathartic complaining, even if it's not going to bring about any substantive change.

But it turns out there is another way to complain that is vastly more effective. It's called instrumental complaining.

Instrumental complaining, on the other hand, though, is complaining that's intended to bring about a very specific outcome. So, you know, I always have complaints about the cable company. They handle my TV, they handle my internet, and so there's always something that I have to complain about. But if I want something done about that, you know, I could go complain to my neighbor about, you know, who has a totally different service, so it's not like she can do anything about it. But that's not really going to help me. You know, that would be expressive complaining, but that's not going to fix the problem. If I want the problem fixed, then I need to engage in instrumental complaining, call the company up and say, look, my internet's out again, the TV's not working, the phone's not working. That's instrumental complaining where I'm being very intentional about the nature of the complaint in order to bring about a very specific outcome.

And is there a difference in the effectiveness of these kinds of complaining?

That's a great question. It really depends on what your goal is. If what you feel is, I just need to vent, I just need to get it off my chest, the venting is going to be fine. But if your goal is to get the cable fixed, then you're not going to be effective engaging in expressive complaining for that. So it really does depend on what your goal is.

I understand that you and others have done some research looking at the difference between these 2 forms of complaining and the effects on happiness. What do you find, Robin?

Yeah, so what we found with happiness is, first of all, that there's an inverse relationship between happiness and complaining. And it was specifically in terms of pet peeves, which are like very, very specific complaints.

In a study, Robin and her colleagues asked people to list their pet peeves with a significant other. Robin found that while most everyone had annoyances with their partner, the happiest people expressed their complaints differently.

The more you complain, the less happy you are. However, in that study, we also looked at mindfulness, which, you know, you can think of it as really paying attention to or being aware of your complaining. What we think is that people who are mindful sort of modulate their complaining more. It's not that they don't complain, it's not that they don't express pet peeves, but they are very strategic in how they go about complaining, and that allows them to effectively complain while not affecting their happiness levels.

It's an idea that we have explored in many ways on the show. Emotions can be a trigger. We feel angry, we mouth off. But emotions can also be a signal. Instead of immediately reacting, we can ask ourselves, what is this signal telling me, and what should I do about it?

Robin cites one technique to turn triggers So Will Bowen, who started a movement, if you will, called the Complaint-Free World, he has these purple bracelets. Think of it as, you know, like the Livestrong bracelets. They're like that, and they just say Complaint-Free World on them. And his idea behind it is sort of like it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. And so, you know, Will says that if you complain, then you should switch the bracelet from one arm to the next, and you start your 21 days over again. I don't think there's any magic about the bracelet per se, except for the fact that it makes you aware when you complain. Then you modulate your complaining accordingly. My next-door neighbor is a mental health counselor, and at the place that she used to work, one of her colleagues used those bracelets in relationship counseling, like marriage counseling. So each partner had to wear the bracelet, and then when they would complain about their spouse, then they would have to switch the bracelet to the other wrist. And again, it's not the magic of the bracelet, except the bracelet serves as a reminder of, oh my gosh. And, you know, if you don't want to keep flipping the bracelet back and forth, then, you know, you're going to decrease the frequency with which you complain, in that particular case, about your relationship partner.

Another technique to slow down the trigger of emotions is to write about instead of talking about them. Journaling can slow you down. Writing forces you to articulate your thoughts. The slowness of writing allows you to observe your emotions, describe them, not merely act on them. Robin has found it especially effective to write your complaint to the person who has upset you. Rather than reach out to a third party who might be inclined to merely agree with you, Writing your complaint to the person who has offended you can help you modulate your response since you can't exaggerate how badly you were injured. In one study, Robin compared people who wrote complaints to a person who upset them to people who shared complaints with a third party and to people writing about something neutral.

What we found is that when people express their dissatisfaction in a letter directly to the person, They actually said— they ended in the ratings afterwards. They said that they liked that person more. They thought that person liked them more. And they rated their relationship with that person higher than people in either of the other 2 conditions. And it goes back to what we've talked about with the mindfulness. I think when people are writing a letter that they think another person will see and they're expressing their dissatisfaction about that person, I think we articulate it differently. You know, I'm going to express carefully. what I feel and what I'm dissatisfied about. And if you do that, if you engage in that mindful, intentional expression of your complaints, so you're being very strategic about it, then you're going to experience more positive outcomes following that.

Robin once had a chance to apply what she has learned about instrumental complaining. The manager at an apartment complex needed to return a deposit check to her son but was holding out.

The deposit check was due back within 30 days, and the deposit check did not come back. So I just went by there and I said, 30 days has passed and it's time to get the deposit check. And his response was, it's in the mail, which is such a classic line. And I said, oh, it's in the mail. I said, well, when should I expect to receive it? And he said, like 2 weeks from then. And I'm like, Okay. I said, well, when I don't receive it then, I said, what should I do then? Because I knew it wasn't in the mail. And so he said, well, then you come back by or you email me. And so I said, well, I work just down the road. So I said, you can count on me being back here. Well, of course, the check was not in the mail. And so I did email him and I said, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Just cancel that check, and I'll be by there today, and you can write a new check. And so he wrote back, you know, like within half an hour, and he's like, the check will be waiting for you. And okay, good. So, you know, instrumental complaining can be very effective in bringing about desired outcomes.

Robin Kowalski studies the art and the science of complaining at Clemson University in South Carolina. Robin, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For today's unsung hero, we turn the mic over to you, our listeners. It's a story from our show, My Unsung Hero. Today's story comes from Betsy Cox of Simpsonville, South Carolina. In September 2014, Betsy and her husband Steve welcomed their son Blake into the world. Their family didn't have a lot of money at the time, and they lived in a townhouse that could get a bit chilly. So one day, about 9 weeks after Blake was born, Betsy strapped him into his car seat and drove over to her local Walmart to pick up a space heater.

It was one of those first cold mornings where everything felt like a struggle. And I came in just kind of downtrodden, flustered. I was a new mom at the time. And so, you know, just maybe kind of irritable. And of course, I went back to the heater section and they were all sold out. Of heaters. So I was already just, you know, kind of cranky and wishing that the day was going differently. So I made my way over to one of the cleaning aisles. It was the sponges and stuff. And all of a sudden, this man just came booming towards me. So he was a Southern man and had a very jolly-like presence, almost like Santa, and just kind of a larger-than-life dynamic to him. And He said, Rhonda, calling out to his wife, you've got to come see the baby. Can we come see the— can we come look at the baby? And so his accent was very endearing. And he said, he has the most big, beautiful blue eyeballs. And I just never really heard someone say that. And it just made me chuckle and kind of immediately shifted my mood, you know? So then we chatted a little bit and he said at the end, God was good to you, darling. God was real good to you. And he said it with such passion, it just about knocked me over. I can't hardly explain it. It was just this amazing moment of human connection. It was so simple. And it was so strange too, because then after I kind of got over being slightly awestruck from this man, I even went darting down a few aisles to get another look at them. And they were just like, poof, gone. Then as I came out and it was a bright sunny day, and like, I just like looked up to the sky like, who's this man? He just made me feel so good. And you remember how people make you feel. I know He was put right there for me that day, as crazy as that might seem or sound, but I just, I can feel it. God was very good to me, and I'm so grateful and just Just in the blink of an eye like that, he changed my whole outlook of that day. He impacted my life. And so I just, I want to say thank you to him. He's truly been an unsung hero to me.

Betsy Cox of Simpsonville, South Carolina. When we talked to her, Blake was 7 years old. Friends and family His family call him Blake the Great because of his adventurous spirit. If you would like to help us build more stories like this, please act now. Visit support.hiddenbrain.org and join the hundreds of other Hidden Brain listeners who have showed us they have our back. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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