Why You Always Get Punished for Telling The Truth

There's a story about Zig Ziglar, the motivational speaker. A woman approached him at one of his seminars, begging him for help. She said she hated her job. Her boss was horrible. Her coworkers were mean to her.

What should she do?

Well, Zig told her to shut up and stop complaining.

He said she sounded like the negative one. He told her to chant aphorisms into a mirror. She did. Low and behold, she was cured.

I've got bad news for everyone. Zig didn't help this woman. In fact, all he did was reinforce a cognitive bias that psychologists have been studying for decades now. This bias explains a lot about the state of the world today.

It’s called spontaneous trait transference.

In the 1990s, psychologists John Skowronski and Donal Carlston began noticing something strange when someone tried to warn their friends and family about something. Instead of believing them, everyone transferred those negative traits to the person trying to warn them. They confirmed the behavior in four different studies. They defined spontaneous trait transference as when "communicators are perceived as possessing the very traits they describe in others."

The one who smelt it dealt it.

As Skowronsky explains, "politicians who allege corruption by their opponents may themselves be perceived as dishonest" and "critics who praise artists may themselves be perceived as talented." If you describe someone as negative, unreliable, or dangerous, people tend to misremember it as a self-description. Yes, they really think you were talking about yourself.

Later, Rick Brown and John Bassili found that people transfer personality traits to inanimate objects like bananas. They do it without thinking. Yep, you can condition someone to believe that bananas are evil.

It gets worse.

You know the phrase, don't shoot the messenger?

In 2019, a team of psychologists at Harvard led by Leslie John reviewed hundreds of studies and conducted eleven different experiments to explain why people punish someone for giving them bad news. They learned that the human brain often reaches for the quickest, easiest explanations for negative events in their lives, especially ones that preserve their self-image and group harmony.

As Leslie John and her colleagues write, "people are especially prone to attributing agency to others for negative outcomes." They also "attribute agency to those proximal to the event." There's nothing more proximal to an event than the first person to tell you what's going on. Once again, our shared psychology discourages us from warning each other about threats.

And so:

"Bad news messengers may be prime candidates in recipients' search for antagonists to cast in accounts of unwanted outcomes." Bad news also motivates people to come up with "fallacious" causal explanations "often generated effortlessly, seemingly automatically." They generate these fallacious explanations through poor reasoning "characterized by shallow, unconscious thought."

That's how we wind up with so many conspiracy theories. They're easier to swallow than the truth. They gratify us.

To sum things up, people tend to attribute the bad news and negative events in their lives to those around them, often their friends and family. They don't do a good job of distinguishing between a threat and someone trying to warn them.

They get them mixed up.

This trait explains so much of what's going on now. It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future. It explains how university students have somehow wound up as the villains in so many people's eyes, instead of the governments sponsoring and committing genocide. It explains why you can't criticize billionaires or super rich influencers without that incredibly annoying counter claim:

"You're just jealous."

It explains why you get pathologized and called everything from a doomer to a snowflake for caring about anything but yourself. It explains why pretending to care looks better than actually caring.

I've tried to come up with little strategies and workarounds for all of humanity's psychological shortcomings.

It comes down to this:

You have to find a way to be the smart, positive, compassionate, mature, respectful, charming one. You have to do that even if everyone around you is acting like a complete idiot. You have to find that balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. Unfortunately, time is the one thing we don’t have anymore.

You often have to trick people into doing the right thing.

It's exhausting.

It takes a lot out of you to be respectful to idiots all day long, especially when many of them go out of their way to do you harm. Despite the audacious tone of my writing (my dry humor is often mistaken for bitterness or anger), I try to remain calm and compassionate when dealing with people right in front of me.

And of course, a lot of people will call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk. It's all hard, because every single minute matters now. We don't have decades to change public thought. The plagues are getting worse and more frequent. The climate collapse is accelerating. The weather is getting more extreme. People are dying from heatstroke in the thousands now. They're getting swept away in historic floods. Every disease we ever dealt with is now converging on our weakened immune systems. Our politicians spent the last year whining about TikTok while letting yet another zoonotic disease run rampant. The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us.

It's hard to sound optimistic.

What's my point?

Know this:

You are seen. You are not working in vain. Millions of people out there are listening to your warnings, even if it often doesn't feel that way. Maybe it's not enough to stop the worst of everything. But you're not alone.

It's something, at least.