đ§ The Negativity Bias
đ§ The Negativity Bias
Your brain loves the dark side
A couple of weeks ago, a psychotherapist asked me a question that stuck in my mind: âUnhappy thoughts ruin a good mood all the time, so in the same way, why canât you fix a bad mood by thinking of happy thoughts?â
When youâre happy or proud of something, itâs easy to put a stop to it by thinking of an anxiety or irritation. But when youâre sad or anxious, âthinking happy thoughtsâ just seems fake and futile. Why this asymmetry?
𧲠Negativity is magnetic
Human psychology is filled with cognitive biases and one prominent example is the negativity bias. Negative emotional information commands our attention more than positive emotional information does. As psychologists Rozin & Royzman put it in their 2001 paper: âBrief contact with a cockroach will usually render a delicious meal inedible. The inverse phenomenonârendering a pile of cockroaches on a platter edible by contact with oneâs favorite foodâis unheard of.â
Emotions like anger, fear, and disgust signal a threat. They drive immediate action by stimulating fight-or-flight responses, in contrast to positive emotions like happiness which lack a sense of urgency. This asymmetry in urgency plays out everywhere in life. For example, criticism attracts more attention than praise does. And when hanging out with friends, the emotional impact of arguments is stronger than the emotional impact of joyful interactions. Negativity is the dominant emotional force in controlling attention and decision-making.
Negativity biases impact the way we interpret the world around us. In one experiment, people with a stronger negativity bias were more likely to judge ambiguous facial expressions as sad rather than happy. And those people also showed higher activity in a region of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortexâan area linked with problems such as depression and anxiety among other important functions.
đś Negativity runs deep
Even babies show a negativity bias. If a parent reacts negatively to a toy, an observant toddler is less likely to play with it. But positive reactions from a parent elicit no extra play compared to completely neutral reactions. Kids treat negativity as more noteworthy than positivity, just like their adult parents do.
Infants as young as 3 months old judge people based on how much they help others, and they show a negativity bias in the way they do it. Their behavioral reactions display a clear aversion to antisocial people but donât show any remarkable attraction to helpful people. The brainâs VIP treatment of negative emotions starts early in life, suggesting that the negativity bias is something weâre born with.
You can see the pervasiveness of the negativity bias by comparing adults across cultures too. All around the world, negative news is more emotionally impactful than positive news. An obsession with infuriating, saddening, and terrifying news isnât just a quirk of media in the US and Europe, but rather a preexisting tendency in human psychology. Fortunately, individual people vary substantially in the strength of their negativity bias, so thereâs always an audience for happier news too.
âď¸ The takeaway
Although the negativity bias is widespread and linked to innate principles in human psychology, itâs not universal or unavoidable. There are positivity biases in human psychology too, such as the optimism bias, and people vary in the strength of each of these biases.
When you feel unhappy or demotivated, consider whether the reality of the situation is more positive than your perception is suggesting. The negativity bias filters how you see a problem so try to balance it out by actively listing some positives. What are you grateful for? What has gone well? What have you learned?
Regular meditation practice can give you a less judgmental view of the world. Fittingly, thereâs evidence that mindfulness training reduces the negativity bias.
đĄ A final quote
âWe are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.â
~ Oscar Wilde
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đŹ I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
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quite frankly sounds like too much "negativity" is taken for granted, eg not explicitly favouring helpful behaviour from a young age can be taken as a sign of standard acceptance of such behaviour as a level that is as basic as the ground we walk on, whereas showing dislike to antisocial behaviour is the opposite of vip treatment as you call it, it 's being denied access to the party.
Amidst the whole positive/negative terminology I like to suggest and take into account that as bio-electric beings in an electrified world, we take a clue from ac/dc basics and come to realising that positive/negative always equals itself out, and aiming for more + generates an equally rising -, it takes a balanced steady and grounded flow to generate the energy, both on the wire & as wired as a person may get at times, so what if terms such as "toxic, inherently abusive, detrimental" take the place of what "negativity" is supposed to mean, it might clear matters like a thunderstorm in may, as we are evolutionary on the way to realising that abuse is not alfa