All posts tagged: negative feedback

How to Know Your Frenemy

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …

Make the Placebo Effect Work for You

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. I remember once, at summer camp in the 1970s, 3,000 miles from home, I came down with a nasty case of strep throat. Before I could call my parents or go to the nurse, the coolest kid in camp took me aside. “You know it’s all in your head, right?” he said. “Just decide you don’t have a sore throat, and you won’t.” He was very cool, so it made sense to my early-adolescent brain to take his medical advice. Two days of extreme willpower later, I had a fever of 103 and couldn’t swallow. “The problem is that you are mentally weak,” Cool Kid explained. Defeated, I went to the nurse, who took me to the doctor, who gave me penicillin, which relieved my symptoms within 24 hours. Cool Kid was undaunted. “That stuff is just a placebo,” he told me, referring to a phenomenon in which the mere mental suggestion derived from …