Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Negative Voices

And why I struggle so hard not to.

Image used with permission from canva.com

The Fallacy of the Online Review

What causes someone to leave a review of a business (or a comment on an online article)? Why do, at least from my anecdotal experience, most reviews tend to be very positive or very negative?

Rarely, I think, do you see reviews that express the mundane averageness of an experience. While it is becoming more normal for people to regularly leave reviews, for the most part, people leave a review when they need to express something unordinary.

• The experience was so phenomenal that they need to tell others or they leave a review as a means of thanking and giving back to the business.
• Or, the experience was so terrible that they want to warn other people or use the power of their review to hurt the business.

This, of course, means that the reviews of a business or product might not accurately reflect the general experience of the majority of customers or consumers.

How many products and businesses do you interact with just in the span of one day?

How many of them do you leave reviews for?

I’m guessing there is a measurable gap between your answers.

More importantly, why is this the case?

Why do we only communicate when something is outside of what we consider normal?

Even more so, why does this tend to happen when the experience is negative?

Communication is Limited — We Use it Sparingly

Throughout the course of a day, you will have a seemingly infinite number of moments. You will not, however, have an equal amount of communication.

This is because communicating requires more energy than experiencing something. We have to respond to stimuli and then, beyond just noticing the stimuli:

• Enact a goal-oriented process in our consciousness
• AND, physically send the message — which creates a whole new experience that we might not want to venture into.