Briefly, On Cognitive Reappraisal

We’re going to use this article and this paper to briefly frame up “cognitive reappraisal,” which is the strategy of re-framing distressing situations to move past the negative emotions they engender. Lest you think we’re going to go down some Woke Rabbit Hole of “Owning Your Trauma,” no, that’s too heady of a post for Mondays.

If you’re a generally logical person, you might see the trade-off here. At the individual level, if you take a distressing situation and re-frame it, you can feel better emotionally, and you’re probably less inclined towards general stress and burnout. That’s good. Now, with most good things there’s a bad flip side (pizza: fat; sex: herpes), and here we have one too. Namely, negative emotions and experiences are very prevalent in the human condition, and as such, dealing with them properly — including realizing what parts of a negative situation you yourself caused — is a powerful sequence too. If you’re always using some hipster-ish strategy to avoid an embrace of the negative, that can make you less of a well-rounded, self-aware person.

And, per that article and paper above, it also means that if you engage in counterproductive workforce stuff, like stealing from petty cash or lying about sick days, you’ll probably just come to rationalize it over time. As the article even directly notes:

In the first study, the trio identified 171 people in various occupations who had reported experiencing guilt and shame at work within the past month. The researchers’ next step was to ascertain how the workers had managed those feelings. As expected, they found that the subjects who were able to positively reframe the incidents that had produced guilt or shame were more satisfied with their jobs and less likely to suffer burnout. Unfortunately, the professors report, those same subjects also were “significantly more likely to engage” in counterproductive workplace behaviors, such as treating others rudely and falsifying expenses.

One of the authors says a variation of this quote a bunch of times: “We found that the higher the subjects scored on the tendency to use reappraisal to lessen feelings of guilt and shame, the more willing they were to engage in counterproductive workplace behaviors.”

Indeed, and makes perfect sense. If your emotional contagion strategy is to ultimately lessen negative feelings, then ultimately you’re just going to end up behaving like an addict. An addict can have a bender, fucking wrap their car around a pole, wake up in a hotel on a side of town they’ve never been on, and they will find a way to say “That’s Alicia’s fault” and go right back to their problematic behavior, because one of the core coping approaches to addiction is rationalization and downplay of the negative to continue with what you want to be doing biologically and socially.

It’s very similar at work, which shouldn’t surprise us because a core tenet of work is being busy (or at the very least being seen as being busy), and we know from research that one reason we love being busy is that it makes us feel high. Work is also obviously addiction to many, or at least the off-shoots of work — power, relevance, etc. — are. So there’s a whole messy mix of ties between addiction and work, and this is really just another one: addicts downplay the negative shit to continue doing what they want to do, and many at work do the same thing. Cognitive reappraisal sounds like some Woke Notion Handed Down From Olympus, and to many it is — but the sheer reality is that it keeps people justifying their less-than-stellar behavior through rationalization and downplaying.

As a result, it’s often good for the individual (to a point) and bad for the organization.

Takes?