BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD

Current thinking in cognitive psychology is that people (both adults and children) display what is called a “negativity bias.” One group of researchers concluded that “adults spend more time looking at negative than at positive stimuli, perceive negative stimuli to be more complex than positive ones, and form more complex cognitive representations of negative than of positive stimuli.” This section of the article first examines the evidence in social science literature about the nature and extent of the negativity bias, then looks at the issue through the lens of public policy and politics.

A. Social Science Findings

Negative experiences are more powerful than positive ones. This is true across a wide range of phenomena. In 2001, a group of cognitive psychologists at Case Western Reserve University analyzed all of the then-current studies that compared the relative strength of good and bad effects. For example, one study the authors analyzed found that in personal relationships, it takes at least five positive experiences to overcome the feelings generated by one negative one.  They also observed that “[a]mong journalists and communication scientists, it is considered common knowledge that bad events are more newsworthy and attract more reader attention” and that “bad news sells more papers.”

Recent scholarship in the Applied Legal Storytelling movement makes a similar point. I have pointed out elsewhere that “conflict is the fuel that drives the story.” L.A. Fiedler has likewise pointed out that “no one has ever been able to make a successful novel about a happy marriage.” Conflict is interesting; it makes us pay attention. And, let’s face it, without conflict there would be no lawsuits.

Many of the studies analyzed in the Case Western study suggest that negative information is retained longer and affects us more because the brain processes negative stimuli more thoroughly, possibly because it is evolutionarily adaptive behavior. That is, bad things can kill us, while good things generally cannot. Organisms that are more attuned to detecting and reacting to bad things are therefore more likely to survive.

Because we are prone to processing bad information more extensively, we are more likely to remember bad things. For example, in one study the investigators simply asked people to recall a recent emotional event that had affected them, either positive or negative. The subjects reported negative events more often than positive ones, by about a four-to-one margin. Another study showed that test subjects remembered more negative words than positive ones, and that the negative words (stimuli) resulted in slower responses and more eye blinks, indicating greater conscious processing of the negative stimuli.

In another study, researchers interviewed three groups: people who had won a lottery about a year before the interview, people who had suffered paralysis in an accident about a year before the interview, and a third group who had not experienced any kind of major life-changing event within the last year. Although the group which had suffered paralysis reported significantly lower happiness one year after that event, the lottery winners did not report any significantly higher level of happiness over the control group, suggesting once again that bad feelings and emotions are much longer-lasting than good ones.

Negative information is weighted more heavily than positive information in forming impressions of others. The Case Western researchers described nearly twenty studies that all confirmed that negative information about another person was retained longer and had a more profound impact on test subjects’ overall impressions of that other person. One of those studies also found that persons evaluating others were more confident about their bad impressions of the other than they were of their favorable impression of others with good traits.

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