Understanding your Feedback Personality type · 4:01am Aug 30th, 2017
I recently finished rereading the book: Thanks for the Feedback. I highly recommend it as it's chock full of good life advice about how to actually give and receive feedback.
But what really struck me about the book was one chapter that described what I'm going to call "Feedback personality types." These are just the way in general in which we respond to getting feedback from others.
Here's a diagram of the four types of Feedback personalities:
Personality #1: Hates feedback
This is the kind of person that absolutely hates getting feedback. Good feedback passes through them very quickly and does not last. However, bad feedback can affect them for a long time. In general, people that take feedback like this won't like getting feedback at all because even a 10% amount of bad feedback will be unbearable to deal with. No feedback at all would be preferable.
Personality #4: Loves feedback
Link to Comic
This is the kind of person that loves getting feedback. Good feedback completely energizes them and can give them a long boost for a good while. Bad feedback, on the other hand, will be taken in stride and not affect them all that much. Over time any feedback would be preferable as it helps and boosts them to improve.
Personality #3: Doesn't care about feedback
People that don't care about feedback may be because they don't really experience that much of a high or low based on it. It doesn't affect them that much regardless of what it is.
Personality #2: Anxious about feedback
This group has a lot of anxiety about feedback. Not only is bad feedback devastating, but good feedback is absolutely thrilling! They have everything to gain by getting good feedback, but at the same time have to deal with a very long period of angst over any bad feedback they receive.
I personally fit into this last group. I am often terrified of comments, but they are also the source of some of my greatest joys about the things I create. There is just so much riding on the feedback that it can be really anxiety inducing.
Well anyway, I hope that diagram helped you understand which group you fit into so that the next time you receive feedback you understand your own reactions to it better. Getting feedback is the only way we can improve ourselves and so the better we can take it and understand it, the better we become.
Intriguing idea. Although I now find myself not quite fitting into any particular category. I definitely react fine to negative feedback so I'd be, as you put it, low risk. But I don't really believe people who give positive feedback. Not that they're lying, just that they're wrong if they say I've done something good or better. Mostly I react like this because I am intimately aware of the depths of my own inadequacy in a way no one else ever could be.
Long explanation short, I highly value negative feedback for being honest and correct and disregard positive feedback for being inaccurate, but I don't find either type to be particularly detrimental or a cause of long or short-term anxiety in any way, shape or form.
Maybe I'm riding the line between low risk/low reward and low risk/high reward or something. I 'unno.
I guess I'm somewhere between Personality 1 about certain things, and Personality 2 about others. It seems like different media encourage different things.
On Fimfiction, if people like my writing, I get favorites, follows, and even comments. That feels great! I especially love comments because I love seeing when people catch all the little easter eggs and other candies I throw into my writing. I want people to catch them, and it's a tough game to play: make it subtle enough to count as an easter egg for the reader, but obvious enough that anyone at all catches it without engaging in close literary analysis. It's the most gratifying thing when we can play that game well together
, so I'm a total Personality 2. In fact, the worst feedback is when people favorite or follow, but leave no comments, or short confused comments. That makes me wonder if I've made it too hard to follow the writing and the game has become one-sided.
On the other hand, a lot of professional and academic writing actually feels pretty bad, turns me into a total Personality 1. The thing about it is, there's no "up" to reach for. You work as best you can to reach the highest standard, which ends up being, "Ok this is acceptable." Rarely, there's a higher highest standard, which is, "This is not only acceptable but actually praiseworthy." You want everything to be acceptable at least, ideally praiseworthy, but actually, the whole feedback game is designed so that most writing you submit won't be acceptable
. "Acceptable" is actually "the top 6% of what we received", and it's hard to impossible to please everyone reliably enough to get Acceptables most of the time 
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Yes, those types of reactions exist, and I'm closest to a #2, but for me, that's a bit simplistic. Taking my art as an example, feedback from an artist or someone who's very knowledgeable about art gets much more weight than feedback from a non-artist, and detailed feedback gets much more weight than simple like/dislike.
There's also constructive vs. abusive feedback. For example, I completely blow the foreshortening in a drawing. Someone who says, "Yikes! You should do X, Y, and Z to fix that," will get way more attention than someone who says, "That looks like ass, man!" (Even though they're right.)