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Be a Better Bearer of Bad News

Kate Morgan
Forge
Published in
4 min readNov 8, 2019
A young woman grimaces, her hand to her face as she hears something on the phone, obviously bad news.
Photo: RapidEye/E+/Getty

WeWe all have times when we have to tell someone something they don’t want to hear: I’m not going to make that deadline. We don’t have the budget for that. Sorry, I have plans that night. Being the bearer of bad news is an unfortunate but inevitable part of being a human, along with birth, death, and getting spinach stuck in your teeth.

And when you are the bearer of bad news, there’s a good chance the person on the receiving end will take it out on you, whether they grumble out loud or just quietly seethe to themselves. Recently, a new study out of Harvard Business School titled “Shooting the Messenger” confirmed what most of us already suspected: We have a tendency to, well, shoot the messenger, pinning our displeasure about bad news on whoever delivers it. It’s not just that we subconsciously like them less; according to the study, we also tend to believe — whether it makes sense or not — that the messenger is happy about what they’re saying.

“We tend to irrationally believe people can control chance events,” says Leslie John, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a co-author of this new study, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. “If a meteorologist says the forecast is bad, our research says you’ll…

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Forge
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Published in Forge

A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Kate Morgan
Kate Morgan

Written by Kate Morgan

Kate is a freelance journalist who’s been published by Popular Science, The New York Times, USA Today, and many more. Read more at bykatemorgan.com.

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