Anonymous Feedback Forms Are Not Very Useful

Good advice requires context

I have reached new heights of laziness in finding a picture to go with my post so people will click on it.

For many years, many of my friends have used an anonymous feedback form such as Admonymous. However, in my experience, these forms very rarely produce useful or actionable feedback.

First, knowing who gave you a piece of feedback is actually really important context. Let’s say that you got feedback that you talk too much about your interest in mosses. If you have an Admonymous linked in your Facebook profile, the feedback could have come from:

• Your best friend.

• The guy you have a crush on.

• A coworker who has a chip on his shoulder against anyone talking about anything other than work at work.

• A wise acquaintance you look up to and respect.

• Your most judgmental acquaintance who dislikes 90% of people for extremely petty reasons.

• Your acquaintance who is a very nice person but he’s exclusively interested in Magic: the Gathering and is upset whenever the conversation isn’t about Magic: the Gathering.

• A guy you met at a party when you had just finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss and were unusually moss-obsessed.

• Your ex that you had a really, really bad breakup with.

Some of these are much more credible sources than others.

Since you don’t know, you have to make up who gave the feedback. If you’re a self-hate-y sort, you might decide that your crush or your best friend gave you the feedback and shut up about your interests, when in reality everyone who spends time with you is eager to hear moss facts. Conversely, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t much like uncomfortable self-awareness, you can easily dismiss feedback as coming from someone who hates you—even if it’s a sincere sentiment from a friend who is pointing out a flaw you really have.

Second, in my experience, good feedback almost always leads to a conversation. Much of the time, if a person is doing something bad, it’s because they don’t understand how to do better. If you have a friend who tells dirty jokes in inappropriate contexts because she can’t read the room even though she doesn’t want to make people uncomfortable, an anonymous statement along the lines of “you tell inappropriately sexual jokes and it makes people uncomfortable” is not especially helpful. If she knew what kind of jokes were okay, she wouldn’t be making people uncomfortable. If she’s going to change her behavior, she’ll need to ask someone with good judgment questions like “so, is X okay? I’m confused about why Y is all right and Z is bad. Is Q a good heuristic?” Of course you don’t have to do this—it’s fine to just not invite Dirty Jokes In Inappropriate Contexts Woman to inappropriate contexts—but the one-sentence statement is unlikely to change her behavior.

Further, no one has a perfectly complete and accurate view of anyone else’s life. But it’s a rare skill to give feedback that is exclusively about what the person observes, with none of their interpretations and preconceptions. A lot of feedback that sounds absolutely wild to the recipient is in fact identifying a genuine problem—it’s just not the problem the giver thinks it is. You might get some feedback that you never put any thought into the parties you host and that means your guests aren’t having a good time, and go “I obsess over party logistics for hours and hours! What gives?” But a conversation might reveal that you’re putting all your energy into your decorations, which no one cares about, and instead you need to make sure that you buy snacks that match everyone’s dietary restrictions. The problem was real, but the feedback giver had misidentified what it was; with an anonymous feedback form, you’d never be able to straighten out the misunderstanding and change your behavior.

In this post, I’ve been mostly focusing on negative feedback, but the conversation problem applies equally to positive feedback. “I think you’re hot and I want to go out on a date, but I’m too shy to say anything”: uh, thanks? I don’t know who you are so I can do nothing about this?

Finally, nearly all my friends already know what their problems are (or at least what their friends would say their problems are).¹ If you already know you’re irresponsible or easily angered or overly picky or unable to set boundaries, and you’re trying really hard to do something about it but you can’t because fixing your fundamental personality flaws is hard, then feedback along those lines feels like a slap in the face. Like, jeez, I know. I’m trying.

My friends have a healthy criticism culture, which is probably why people know what other people dislike about them.² An anonymous feedback form might be a good workaround in cultures where a private one-on-one conversation is unacceptable. However, I almost always see anonymous feedback forms used in cultures where people criticize each other to their faces all the time—perhaps because these are the cultures in which criticism is most strongly valued. I think that in those cultures anonymous feedback forms are far more likely to cause hurt feelings than to cause useful behavior change, and the practice should be discontinued.

1. Similarly, they already know what their positive traits are, which can make an anonymous compliment about their sense of humor, excellent parties, or pretty face feel like bit of an anticlimax.

2. I am personally very grateful for the amount that people have called me on my enormous amount of shit.