Multi-grit sandpaper, a “water butt connector pipe link kit”, a five-pack of AAA batteries, “slow blow” fuses, vacuum cleaner bags, a tea towel and nail clippers. Tidying my inbox, I see these are some of the things I’ve been asked to give feedback on recently. The purveyors of these high-end lifestyle items – truly worthy of my aspiration to become an “aesthete” of the week in the Financial Times – would love my thoughts. So here goes: no idea; no idea; generated electricity adequately; no idea; yes, they are vaccum cleaner bags; what tea towel … Hang on, I actually do have an opinion on the nail clippers. The business end – the beak? – is deeper than normal, so I keep nicking my fingertips. No stars.
I see from searching for the dread phrase “Love to hear from you” that the dentist who hasn’t answered my plaintive queries about my broken tooth also wants feedback, as does the chain hotel where I left my favourite skirt, leading to multiple unanswered phone calls and them eventually denying all knowledge of it. It’s time to get my Oprah on – you get zero stars and you get zero stars, and you, and you!
I won’t. I hate reviewing stuff. I can barely muster enough opinions to write this column once a week, let alone generate any copy about draft excluder tape. Can any of us? But we’re invited, wheedled, then asked again with brittle desperation to review everything from supermarket self-checkouts to orthopaedic surgeons. Beleaguered minimum-wage service industry workers give out QR codes to rate their performance and businesses live in fear of TripAdvisor and Trustpilot; Amazon customers write one-star reviews of books they haven’t read because the envelope it came in was torn or the cover was the wrong shade of blue. Alternatively, you can step into the idyllic parallel universe of Airbnb, where review reciprocity often acts like a nuclear deterrent, so that every cat-hair-filled fleapit and unreasonable slob gets five stars. It’s endless and pointless.
But, mainly, I don’t think I should dish it out when I absolutely can’t take it. I would not love to hear from you. In fact, I’d rather never know I’ve done a good job than risk being told I’ve done a bad one. It’s not ideal in a line of work where people declaring they would fail an undergraduate who wrote as badly as you (a purely theoretical example that isn’t seared into my hippocampus) comes with the territory. A recent jokey TikTok trend had women issuing dating “exit interviews” to the men who ghosted them, with questions such as “rate personality from 1 (best) to 4 (worst)”. It was very funny but the thought of my exes reviewing me, like a substandard tradesman, fills me with primal horror.
That doesn’t make me special. It’s a trope of management psychology that we are “hardwired” to hate negative feedback because it’s a threat to our idea of ourselves. Research even suggests we will go as far as reshaping our social networks to avoid hearing it. I think it’s more that I don’t want my worst beliefs about myself confirmed, causing my little worm’s sense of self-worth to crumple like wet tissue paper. But, either way, I absolutely do not have the “growth mindset” that allows you to accept feedback gracefully and use it positively rather than fester miserably, verbatim phrases from your annual appraisal popping into your head uninvited for the next 20 years.
Should I be braver and invite some radical candour into my life? Maybe if I let myself be judged like a Bic for Her it wouldn’t be as bad as I fear. There’s encouragement to be extrapolated from research on the “liking gap”: how people tend to like us more than we believe. But what if they don’t? Maybe it isn’t worth the risk: a vast review of feedback experiments found that feedback actually had a negative effect in 38% of cases, and even positive feedback didn’t necessarily have positive results. So, should we just hush and stop rating one another (and household ephemera) entirely? I really don’t know. And that’s a zero-stars conclusion right there.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
