> The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Intuitively this seems accurate. Wonderi

> The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Intuitively this seems accurate. Wondering if you know of actual research regarding this though? To add to that, I think people have a hard time assessing relative success. Imagine being dropped in as the captain of the Titanic after it's hit the iceberg. If you manage to delay the sinking for an extra hour, which allows more people to escape, you are successful even if most people do drown. You're successful relative to some expected value. But drive-by armchair analysts will just see that the ship sunk and a bunch of people died and blame you. Obviously this situation is much more complicated, since opinions will differ about whether Yahoo was in fact inevitably sinking, or whether a different captain could have helped it survive.