Mr. Harford knows the problem well. He calls it the “praise sandwich,” where we stuff the bad stuff between two slices of compliments. But people often hear only the praise.

“We say, ‘That was a great piece of work, there was just a small problem,’ ” Mr. Harford said. “What we tend to hear is, ‘That was a great piece of work.’ ”

The better way, Ms. Ching said, is to be straightforward.

Research bears that out. In a class she teaches, Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago and co-author of the paper “Tell Me What I Did Wrong,” conducts a simulation where half the class gives one-on-one feedback to the other half. Although the feedback givers were supposed to indicate that performance was unsatisfactory, that improvement was needed and to offer ways to do better, in surveys filled out later, the half getting the feedback “thinks they’re doing great,” she said.

While many of us tend to hear what we want to hear, Professor Fishbach says she thinks the problem lies more with those providing the feedback. “The negative feedback is often buried and not very specific,” she said.

Professor Fishbach also said people giving feedback often didn’t give enough information, offered it too late or told subordinates what would happen if they did something wrong rather than what they were actually doing wrong. Employees need to know in detail what they should do to get promoted, for instance. If you tell them simply that they’re not going to get promoted, she said, “That’s not feedback — it’s already an outcome.”

Some companies have developed their own terminology for feedback. Peter Sims, author of “Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries,” said the film company Pixar used an idea it called “plussing.” The point, he said, is to “build and improve on ideas without using judgmental language.”

Here’s an example he offers in his book. An animator working on “Toy Story 3” shares her rough sketches and ideas with the director. “Instead of criticizing the sketch or saying ‘no,’ the director will build on the starting point by saying something like, ‘I like Woody’s eyes, and what if his eyes rolled left?”