Introduction — 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?

Part One — 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.

Hence, the vast majority of our lives are left unresponded to.

Because communication — requiring time, energy, and creating increasingly complex realities — is a limited resource.

We, therefore, use it sparingly.

Part Two — Negative Communication

What experiences deserve our communication the most? In short, the bad ones. But it’s more complex than that.

We usually feel something deserves (or requires) us to respond for two reasons:

The experience is divergent from the norm.
The experience is viewed as a threat.

You do not go about your day constantly remarking about what you see, notice, feel, think, et cetera because that would require you to constantly talk all day and you can’t communicate fast enough to give noticeable attention to everything.

You have something called sensory memory — every moment you are alive, you are taking in information of anything you see, taste, touch, smell, or hear. You don’t even register the majority of sensory experiences because we catalogue those experiences as insignificant, normal, or generally acceptable.

Until it isn’t.

Then we say something.

Whether that communication is verbal or nonverbal depends on a variety of factors, but we don’t waste our communication.

We use it when something feels like it needs to be addressed.

We save our communication for the exceptional.

Which usually happens to be something we fear.

Part Three — Negativity Makes the Loudest Noise

I have one of those jobs where I typically only know what people think when there is a problem.

Someone disagrees with a decision or something I said and that becomes the only information I have on what people think.

Because like the business that has the glaring negative review, the majority of people felt no need to communicate the experience they had. There was nothing startling, exceptional, or threatening to respond to. Nothing sent off alarms that needed to be spoken to or confronted.

Negativity, generally, is what makes the most noise.

And while it probably doesn’t reflect the majority of voices or the reality of the experience, it is the loudest.

People yell fire.

And we only quietly whisper love.

Part Four — The Negative Noise is Not the Whole Story

The problem with this unfortunate reality of communication is that we might begin to think that the negative review is reality.

If I only hear one negative voice, that is the only data I have to physically work with in determining how things are going. The communication we receive becomes our perception of the world.

Your partner might love you dearly but only mentioned that one critique.
The community generally supports the direction things are going, but that handful of people were the only ones to raise concerns.
Your friend enjoys every minute you are together, but they only told you what they disagreed with.

That, then, becomes our focus — because the negative was the only reality we heard.

Which makes it the only reality we know about.

And we end up living from that lack.

Conclusion — Learning to Yell Love & Listen for the Whisper

We need to understand that:

The voices yelling fire are not the only voices.
This is the result of a very normal communication process.

Then, we may be able to avoid the spiral of negativity that so often plagues our perception.

As a culture and as people, we need to:

1 — Stop Whispering Love

We need to be aware that our natural tendency to not say the assumed things might actually be hurting the relationship.

If we have something that could help another person and create a more accurate picture of their reality:

Then we need to say it.

Read more about how to do that here

2 — Don’t Make Them Guess

The most common advice I give to people in romantic relationships is to use direct communication.

Not only do we tend to whisper love, but we also tend to say the good things indirectly. We do this because direct, explicit communication feels unnecessary. We assume the other person already knows.

They don’t.

And one of the best things you can do is make sure they are seeing themselves the way you actually and fully see them. Otherwise, the other person will perceive reality according to the data they have.

For more on direct versus indirect communication

3 — The Noise Doesn’t Reflect Reality

The first two suggestions are acts you can take to help another person with this problem. But what about when you are on the receiving end of this problem?

First, we have to know that the negative noise — the fires — are the minority.

It’s hard to have a proper sense of proportion concerning what people think when you only hear the complaints and disagreements. Remember, most people are only speaking what they feel is necessary and that is usually a result of fear.

Don’t let 1% of reality become reality.

4 — Don’t Let the Fires Consume Your Attention

Often, we will placate the loud voices because they are the only ones we hear.

We spend a lot of time putting out fires.

We need to spend more time nurturing the relationships that — even if they don’t always say it — actually care for us.

The negative energy can be magnetic and we might spend so much of our time trying to fix the 1% of issues when we could have been fostering the 99% of love that just didn’t happen to be as loud.

Listen for the whispers.

Because they are definitely there.