Our Hard-Wired Negativity Bias

I ran across an article by Jacob Burak called Humans are wired for negativity, for good or ill (Aeon, September 4, 2014). This short essay is worth considering.

I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company — that’s what most people pick. But why?

Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path.

The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.

Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer.

There is no doubt such a bias exists. We quickly absorb bad news, and we dwell on it. We tend to gloss over good news, or the absence of bad news. For example, reader "Ed" asserted yesterday that I am autistic, which is simply not true. Ed doesn't know me, has never talked to me, and so on. I took that remark as insulting. Yet, the brain (in this case my brain) is wired to take notice of and dwell on such negative remarks, and downplay the importance other more positive comments, some of which complemented me. 

And I am absolutely sure that you too have had such experiences all your life. Negativity bias is real.

But haven't I said that humans are optimists? That humans need to maintain a positive outlook? Is there some contradiction? No. Negativity bias goes like this—

We are especially sensitive to (attuned to) negative events that have already happened, or are happening right now.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the survival value of this bias is obvious. The descendants of those who weren't overly attuned to negative events—and throw in some bad luck—are not here today.

One of the first researchers to explore our negative slant was the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize, and best known for pioneering the field of behavioral economics. In 1983, Kahneman coined the term ‘loss aversion’ to describe his finding that we mourn loss more than we enjoy benefit. The upset felt after losing money is always greater than the happiness felt after gaining the same sum.

The psychologist Roy Baumeister, now professor at Florida State University, has expanded on the concept. ‘Centuries of literary efforts and religious thought have depicted human life in terms of a struggle between good and bad forces,’ he wrote in 2001. ‘At the metaphysical level, evil gods or devils are the opponents of the divine forces of creation and harmony. At the individual level, temptation and destructive instincts battle against strivings for virtue, altruism, and fulfilment. “Good” and “bad” are among the first words and concepts learnt by children (and even by house pets).’

After reviewing hundreds of published papers, Baumeister and team reported that Kahneman’s find extended to every realm of life – love, work, family, learning, social networking and more. ‘Bad is stronger than good,’ they declared in their seminal, eponymous paper.

Negativity bias is hard-wired in the brain.

The machinery by which we recognize facial emotion, located in a brain region called the amygdala, reflects our nature as a whole: two-thirds of neurons in the amygdala are geared toward bad news, immediately responding and storing it in our long-term memory, points out neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley.

This is what causes the ‘fight or flight’ reflex — a survival instinct based on our ability to use memory to quickly assess threats. Good news, by comparison, takes 12 whole seconds to travel from temporary to long-term memory. Our ancient ancestors were better off jumping away from every stick that looked like a snake than carefully examining it before deciding what to do.

Here we see another way in which "Flatland" distorts (compromises) memory, as I pointed out in my post Unethical Amnesia. We tend to form stronger, longer lasting memories of negative experiences in our lives. Memories of good events tend to be weaker, and weaken over time. You can thank your amygdala for that. And thus the bias that protected our ancestors for millions of years can be a pain in the ass today.

Of all the cognitive biases, the negative bias might have the most influence over our lives. Yet times have changed. No longer are we roaming the savannah, braving the harsh retribution of nature and a life on the move. The instinct that protected us through most of the years of our evolution is now often a drag—threatening our intimate relationships and destabilising our teams at work.

I am not familiar with the scientific literature on this subject, but it seems to me that humans are particularly attuned to human (animal) agents who have harmed us or others, or intend harm. This simple observation has broad implications.

For example, humans overreact to and dwell on terrorist acts or hate crimes, but largely ignore extreme weather events made more severe by climate change. Those who are directly effected by floods or droughts do react in "normal" ways, of course, but those not directly effected mostly dismiss them and their importance. Reading about the severe flooding in East Texas is not the same as experiencing it.

On the other hand, if the negative event is a massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando, everyone overreacts and dwells on the event far beyond its real significance. Thus negativity bias magnifies the perceived risk of future events with the same footprint, as opposed to, for example, the odds of dying in a car crash or by an accidental firearms discharge, where there is no human agent intending harm (so-called "unintentional injuries").

So bad is stronger than good, especially if there is "bad" human agent. And here we can relate this to the current election. For a variety of reasons, humans (here, Americans) can not properly assess the abstract economic and social risks which gave rise to Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders, too). But once we have Donald Trump, if he is perceived as "bad" as opposed to "good", humans are hard-wired to focus on the risk presented by Donald Trump himself, not the deeper social decay which created him.

And if that's not depressing, what is?

I could say much more about this, but I'll leave it at that.

 

Comments

[Jeff]

No consolation across the pond, Dave. The level of discourse here in the UK on the Brexit referendum has been appalling-- from both sides really. Everyone pointing fingers at "bad" human agents like right wing politicians or immigrants or MP-killing crazies and a scant few actually thinking about the systemic failures of the EU (and really it's even broader than that) that give rise to all this. I guess we are humans here, too. As an American living over here I get it from both ends-- depressing.