Why Does Your Brain Love Negativity? The Negativity Bias
Remember the insult that stuck with you for too long? The bad news you can’t quite shake off? Or the mistake you fixate on?
As it turns out, we are evolutionary wired to give greater weight to negative experiences instead of positive ones.
We automatically respond faster and stronger to the bad, easily dismissing the good. Neuropsychologists call this the Brain’s Negativity Bias and you can blame our ancestors for such a negative nature, here’s why.
From an evolutionary standpoint, our survival depended on this negativity bias. It was a way for our ancestors to be cautious of all environmental dangers around us. Being constantly so alert to threats and worst case scenarios is what helped our ascendants survive. Through evolution the bias has become so automatic that it can be detected at the earliest stage of the brain’s information processing.
Much research has been done on Brain Negativity Bias. A popular example is the work of John Cacioppo, PhD, at the University of Chicago. In his studies the participants were shown pictures known to arouse positive feelings, pictures certain to provoke negative feelings and those known to cause neutral feelings.
Simultaneously, Cacioppo recorded electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex that reflects the magnitude of information processing taking place. Whenever the stimuli was negative the brain reacted with greater surge in electrical neural activity, showing how our attitudes are more influenced by bad news than good or neutral news.
Take into account the machinery that regulates our emotions and motivation, a brain region called the amygdala. Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, explains how our amygdala uses about two-thirds of its neurons to detect negativity and then quickly stores it into long-term memory. Imagine this, two thirds of your emotions and motivation regulator is designed to focus primarily on the negative.
Break the Cycle
In today’s world, having a constant negativity bias is no longer necessary for our survival. Besides, continually using it can increase stress levels, impair our happiness and general quality of life. Also, it makes it harder to be patient and giving toward others.
There is a way to change the Brain’s Negativity Bias. It’s a matter of training our brains for positivity, to actively become more attuned to positive emotions such as joy, interest, contentment, pride and love. Science claims that for a positive experience to get into our long-term memory we should hold it in our field of attention for at least 10-20 seconds, if not it disappears.
Along with encoding into the long term, this helps with sensitising the amygdala to focus more on the good. Remember, the brain sees what it expects to see, what it becomes primed for. Here’s an example – think about buying a new car, you are looking at a Honda and suddenly you keep seeing Hondas everywhere.
Actively build up on the positive. Look for the good (facts) and turn them into positive experiences. Try to do this at least half a dozen times a day, each time for half a minute. The longer we hold our awareness of it and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the stronger the trace in memory. So the taste of good coffee, a lovely sunset or an unexpected compliment, try turn it into a good experience, notice it and savour it.
You can also do this ritually, making time for reflection before falling asleep (when the brain is considerably receptive to new learning). A pool of literature in psychology confirms further exercises that can be practiced. One in particular is mindfulness, a state of bringing one’s attention to external and internal experiences occurring in the present moment, a technique often used within Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
Remember, neurons that fire together wire together. So, any single time you consciously decide to take in the good it will make a small difference and over time these little differences will add up.
Author: Eva Berkovic | https://miuc.org/brain-love-negativity-negativity-bias/
Evolution of Negativity Bias and How to Change it
Imagine you are living thousands of years ago among our ancestors. Unlike many of your peers, you’re an outrageously optimistic prehistoric person, roaming the savannah feeling grateful to be alive.
One day, in the middle of a hunter-gatherer mission, you pause and take a moment to look around and scan the scene. Over to your left, lurking behind a bush, you see an animal. You’ve never seen this animal before. It’s a lion. “Wow, what a fascinating creature.” you think. “I’ll head over there and take a closer look”. Perhaps the lion is friendly, in which case you may enjoy an interesting encounter. More likely, you’re mauled to death.
A negativity bias
For most of human history, cost-benefit decisions have favoured those with a pessimistic view. We may have missed out on some opportunities but in a threat-filled world, expecting the worst significantly increased the probability that our DNA would remain in the gene pool. A negativity bias in our thinking was adaptive.
Fast forward a few millennia and our bodies and brains continue to be built according to much the same genetic load that influenced our ancestor’s predispositions.
Our brains continue to operate in accordance with this negativity bias. Many forms of evidence suggest that ‘bad’ is stronger than ‘good’ as a general principle, across a wide range of psychological phenomena.
Does the threat of illness motivate us to change behaviour?
Unfortunately, while an effective way to avoid predators, our innate skew toward the negative does not seem to be very effective at motivating us to make good decisions in the modern world. We’re much less likely to be eaten by a predator, but chronic diseases, associated with poor lifestyle decisions, are an increasingly aggressive global killer.
If you were diagnosed with a serious health condition such as heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease or diabetes, you might imagine that this would be sufficient motivation to change your behaviour. In 2012, researchers posed this question based on longitudinal data from 17,276 individuals. The primary focus was to investigate how patients behaved, before and after a serious diagnosis.
After analysing the 12 years of data covered by the study, the researchers concluded that people rarely made positive changes in lifestyle behaviours, even after they had been diagnosed with a chronic condition.
This is despite strong evidence to suggest that adopting a healthier lifestyle can extend longevity, reduce the likelihood of the condition recurring and enhance quality of life. Bad news does not appear to be an effective motivator for change, but still we persist in using a negativity bias to try to influence behaviour. Are there any other options?
A solution to negativity bias?
Dr Richard Boyatzis is an expert in the field of emotional intelligence and behaviour change. In 2013, Boyatzis and his fellow researcher, Dr Anthony Jack, collaborated on a study to assess contrasting coaching and mentoring approaches.
The researchers divided a cohort of volunteers into two groups. Each volunteer was interviewed for 30 minutes on themes relating to ‘life coaching’ and performance, but the coaches who conducted the interviews used two contrasting techniques:
1) Group one
Coaches asked questions that focussed on the problems and challenges the volunteers were facing. The coaches emphasised problem-solving techniques to try to identify solutions. This approach tended to bring up issues associated with other people’s expectations, weaknesses, obligations, and fears.
2) Group two
Coaches asked questions designed to encourage the volunteers to imagine a positive future, such as how they would like their lives to look in 10 years’ time. The questions drew out the volunteer’s vision in more detail.
Dr Boyatzis describes the coaching approach in group two, which emphasised vision, hopes and dreams, as “coaching and mentoring to the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA).” This contrasts with coaching in group one where the approach is characterised as coaching to the “Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA).”After a period of five to seven days, both groups of volunteers were asked to return and answer a series of follow-up questions by the same coach, using the same approach as in the first interview.
During this second round of questioning, the students’ brains were scanned using fMRI, a brain imaging technique which detects changes associated with blood flow, to measure brain activity. The results demonstrated that the two contrasting interview approaches activated different and distinct regions in the brain.
The Negative Emotional Attractor approach, which emphasised the problems over the vision, activated the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ nervous system and regions of the brain associated with blaming ourselves and experiencing negative moods. When we experience NEA, our sympathetic nervous system becomes more dominant. Physiologically, heart rate and blood pressure increase, but we are also more likely to make decisions based on fast, instinctive, but sometimes faulty, shortcuts in our thinking. We are more likely to be fixed, rather than flexible.
A plausible mechanism for PEA
The difference in brain blood flow between the two conditions points to an underlying mechanism that may help to describe why the Positive Emotional Attractor approach is more effective. In the study, it appeared that coaching and mentoring to the PEA resulted in activation of regions in the brain associated with developing a plan or vision for the future.
When we focus our attention on positive themes, reward circuits and areas of our brain associated with experiencing positive moods activate. In addition, our parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system becomes more dominant.
When we reduce our perception of threat, our mind may consider that it’s safe to take more time over decisions and think more deeply. We become more cognitively flexible, able to simulate multiple future possibilities and consider new ideas, as well as taking into account how other people think and feel.
These patterns of activity are vital for motivation, sustaining positive feelings and keeping going when we experience challenges – characteristics that are crucial if we are trying to change our behaviour and work towards a goal.
“You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive.”
– Dr Richard Boyatzis
A positive focus to thrive
Psychologist and journalist Dan Goleman quotes Dr Boyatzis as saying: “You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive.”
Coaching and mentoring that encourages us to imagine a positive vision of the future, focussing our attention on possibilities and dreams has been shown to enhance behavioural change and increase the likelihood that we will achieve what we are hoping for.
That’s not to say that we should ignore problems entirely. Rather, consider the starting point when you next begin to think about a new challenge or opportunity. Will you begin by listing the problems and threats, or take a step back, make a conscious challenge to your negativity bias and make your starting point a vision for a more positive future, characterised by growth, learning, development and possibility. Evidence suggests this may be the most effective approach; unless, of course, you are staring down a lion.
First published on the World Economic Forum Agenda.
https://www.hintsa.com/evolution-of-negativity-bias-and-how-to-change-it/
The Negativity Bias: Why the Bad Stuff Sticks
“The bad stuff is easier to believe. You ever notice that?” says Julia Roberts’ character, Vivian, in Pretty Woman (1990). As it turns out, Roberts’ character, Vivian, was touching on an unfortunate psychological truth; the “bad stuff” is indeed easier to believe and the reasons why may surprise you.
For starters, our proclivity for paying attention to negative rather than positive information is an evolutionary hand-me-down from our cave-dwelling ancestors. Back then, alertness to danger, AKA “the bad stuff,” was a matter of life and death. “We inherited the genes that predispose us to give special attention to those negative aspects of our environments that could be harmful to us,” explains psychologist and happiness researcher Timothy J. Bono, PhD, who teaches a course in the Science of Happiness at Washington University in St. Louis. In this way, dwelling on the “bad stuff” is similar to the sensation of pain–it’s our bodies working to keep us safe.
Moreover, negative emotions rouse the amygdala, the almond-shaped brain structure that psychologist Rick Hansen, PhD, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, calls “the alarm bell of your brain.” According to Dr. Hansen, the amygdala “uses about two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news. Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences get quickly stored in memory, in contrast to positive events and experiences, which usually need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage.”
https://www.psycom.net/negativity-bias
Our Brain's Negative Bias
Why our brains are more highly attuned to negative news.
By Hara Estroff Marano published June 20, 2003 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
The answer is, for the same reason political smear campaigns outpull positive ones. Nastiness just makes a bigger impact on our brains.
And that is due to the brain's "negativity bias": Your brain is simply built with a greater sensitivity to unpleasant news. The bias is so automatic that it can be detected at the earliest stage of the brain's information processing.
Take, for example, the studies done by John Cacioppo, Ph.D., then at Ohio State University, now at the University of Chicago. He showed people pictures known to arouse positive feelings (say, a Ferrari, or a pizza), those certain to stir up negative feelings (a mutilated face or dead cat) and those known to produce neutral feelings (a plate, a hair dryer). Meanwhile, he recorded electrical activity in the brain's cerebral cortex that reflects the magnitude of information processing taking place.
The brain, Cacioppo demonstrated, reacts more strongly to stimuli it deems negative. There is a greater surge in electrical activity. Thus, our attitudes are more heavily influenced by downbeat news than good news.
Our capacity to weigh negative input so heavily most likely evolved for a good reason—to keep us out of harm's way. From the dawn of human history, our very survival depended on our skill at dodging danger. The brain developed systems that would make it unavoidable for us not to notice danger and thus, hopefully, respond to it.
All well and good. Having the built-in brain apparatus supersensitive to negativity means that the same bad-news bias also is at work in every sphere of our lives at all times.
So it should come as no surprise to learn that it plays an especially powerful role in our most intimate relationships. Numerous researchers have found that there is an ideal balance between negativity and positivity in the atmosphere between partners. There seems to be some kind of thermostat operating in healthy marriages that almost automatically regulates the balance between positive and negative.
What really separates contented couples from those in deep marital misery is a healthy balance between their positive and negative feelings and actions toward each other. Even couples who are volatile and argue a lot stick together by balancing their frequent arguments with a lot of demonstrations of love and passion. And they seem to know exactly when positive actions are needed.
Here's the tricky part. Because of the disproportionate weight of the negative, balance does not mean a 50-50 equilibrium. Researchers have carefully charted the amount of time couples spend fighting vs. interacting positively. And they have found that a very specific ratio exists between the amount of positivity and negativity required to make married life satisfying to both partners.
That magic ratio is five to one. As long as there was five times as much positive feeling and interaction between husband and wife as there was negative, researchers found, the marriage was likely to be stable over time. In contrast, those couples who were heading for divorce were doing far too little on the positive side to compensate for the growing negativity between them.
Other researchers have found the same results in other spheres of our life. It is the frequency of small positive acts that matters most, in a ratio of about five to one.
Occasional big positive experiences—say, a birthday bash—are nice. But they don't make the necessary impact on our brain to override the tilt to negativity. It takes frequent small positive experiences to tip the scales toward happiness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200306/our-brains-negative-bias
Bad News Sells: How our ‘Negativity Bias’ chooses Bad over Good
Think about the last time you had a great day. Just kidding. Think about the last time you had a bad day. Then try and think a little further: was it really all bad, from the moment you got out of bed? Probably not; one bad thing happened, and then the good lunch you had with your friends and the job interview you aced just didn’t seem so important anymore. Or maybe you were at work, and your boss is gave you some well-deserved praise. Then she told you there was one line on your paperwork that needed to be tweaked, and before you knew it, you were beating yourself up for that one mistake for the rest of the week. Or maybe you went home after work and turned on the news. The coverage never surprises you: war, crime, disaster. Maybe you wonder why this is. Your answer? Negative news attracts more consumers (Nguyen & Claus, 2013).
Our brains tend to focus on and prioritize negative information, even when there is just as much (or more) positive information.
If you’ve had a bad day (that with a different perspective, could’ve been a great day), taken criticism a little too personally, or found yourself transfixed by a car accident on the highway, chances are you’ve experienced a cognitive bias called the Negativity Bias. The Negativity Bias refers to how we pay more attention to, and care more about, negative negative information than we do positive information.
Why do we pay more attention to negative information than positive information? Emotionally, this hardly seems like an enjoyable way of life. But prioritizing negative information can serve valuable purposes – it can even help us survive in dangerous situations (Langeslag & Van Strien, 2018). Paying attention to negative information around can help us notice a threat- like an attacker- so we can react and protect ourselves.
This bias has shown up in all sorts of ways: we are more sensitive towards emotionally negative events; basically, it’s easier for something to make us feel sad than for something to make us feel happy. We often prefer to spend more time and attention on negative events than positive events, like remembering negative experiences or watching disasters on the news. We are more likely to notice negative events, or negative traits in people. Negative personality traits, like laziness or jealousy are more important to us than traits like kindness or honesty when we decide whether to like a person (Rozin & Royzman, 2001; Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998).
The Negativity Bias has a lot to do with how our brains direct our attention. Negative information holds our attention for longer than neutral or positive information. Because we’re drawn to negative information so automatically, it is difficult to control our attention and direct it on something else (positive) instead. The Stroop Task, a famous attention task in cognitive psychology, can also tell us about the negativity bias; specifically, a version of the task referred to as the Emotional Stroop Task. This is how it works:
In the original Stroop Task, participants are presented a list of words that are written in different colors. They are told to report the color the word is written in to the experimenter. Participants have to signore the meaning of the word, which is difficult because reading is (often) a fairly immediate and automatic process. Participants then have to consciously move their attention to focus on the color of the word and report it to the experimenter in order to complete the task. This is particularly tricky, because the meaning of the word (blue, for example) and the color of the word (the font of the word ‘blue’ is colored green, for example) don’t match.
In the Emotional Stroop Task, participants are shown words like these and asked to tell the experimenter the color of each word.
The Emotional Stroop Task is based on the same concept, but instead of color words, participants are presented with negative and neutral words in different colors, and are asked to report to the color of the word to complete the task.
What tends to happen in the emotional Stroop task is that participants take more time to say the color of negative words than neutral words, because it is harder to stop paying attention to negative information (the word) and start paying attention to something else (the color).
Natural selection occurring in evolution has hardwired us to be biased towards negative information, whether it’s noticing it first, or in this case, expecting it constantly.
This Negativity Bias probably isn’t as useful as it once was, say, one or two hundred thousand years ago, when our survival mechanisms were more important in our day to day lives. But it is a bias we want to keep around. Let’s say you go scuba diving in a coral reef. The coral reef is taking up a lot of your attention, as it should – coral reefs are beautiful. But then a shark appears, and it doesn’t look friendly. In this case, you really shouldn’t be prioritizing that beautiful coral reef anymore; focusing on the negative information could save your life. In this situation, the Negativity Bias may still be considered less necessary in modern life, but in this rare situation it may save your life. This benefit of survival is a good reason negative events effect us more than positive events do, even when the negative events and the positive events are equally significant. Research has led scientists to consider the bias to be based in evolutionary theory. As humans have evolved, we have learned a threat (negative) is usually more relevant to our survival than a reward (positive) (See Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1990.)
The Negativity Bias is actually stronger when it involves a threat to our survival. If we see an angry face, we are biased to pay attention to that negative expression- but if we see an angry face and a snake, the snake captures more of our attention. The visual system in our bodies are more powerfully adjusted to notice snakes because of the pressure of snakes on our survival, and therefore our evolution (and primate evolution in a historical context) (Langeslag & Van Strien, 2018). In terms of the Negativity Bias, angry faces would attract more attention than smiling ones- but if we want to pass our genes down to the next generation, we’d better make sure we’re not bitten by a deadly, poisonous snake.
There are lots of cognitive biases like the Negativity Bias that seem like somewhat unnecessary relics of a different time (the mental equivalent of the gallbladder, for comparison). This is because they are! Our brains update a lot slower than our iPhones. The extent to which we care what other people think of us is another example of an outdated cognitive bias. This bias can be somewhat helpful, but we really shouldn’t have to expend as much cognitive energy thinking about it as much as we do. When humans were hunter-gatherers, being accepted by the group was important; if you weren’t, you might be booted out, in which case you were far more vulnerable to, say, being eaten by a wild animal. Caring what people thought of you sometimes kept you alive. These days, if we don’t fit in with a group, we can just go on reddit and find a different one. However, our brains have not quite caught up with this new way of living: desperately wanting to fit in and be liked, by anyone and everyone, is an almost universal human trait. Evolution is slow; we are still hardwired for what would have been a more advantageous trait many thousands of years ago.
When the Negativity Bias isn’t keeping us safe, it can sometimes make life worse for us, like the character in this comic focused on one insult among many positive comments.
https://web.colby.edu/cogblog/2019/12/27/so-you-had-a-bad-day-encountering-the-negativity-bias/
Have you ever found yourself dwelling on an insult or fixating on your mistakes? Criticisms often have a greater impact than compliments, and bad news frequently draws more attention than good.
The reason for this is that negative events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. Psychologists refer to this as the negative bias (also called the negativity bias), and it can have a powerful effect on your behavior, your decisions, and even your relationships.
What Is the Negativity Bias?
The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise.
This psychological phenomenon explains why bad first impressions can be so difficult to overcome and why past traumas can have such long lingering effects. In almost any interaction, we are more likely to notice negative things and later remember them more vividly.
As humans, we tend to:
- Remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones.
- Recall insults better than praise.
- React more strongly to negative stimuli.
- Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.
- Respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones.
For example, you might be having a great day at work when a coworker makes an offhand comment that you find irritating. You then find yourself stewing over his words for the rest of the workday.
https://www.verywellmind.com/negative-bias-4589618
The negativity bias,[1] also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things.[2][3][4] In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.
Explanations
Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman proposed four elements of the negativity bias in order to explain its manifestation: negative potency, steeper negative gradients, negativity dominance, and negative differentiation.[4]
Negative potency refers to the notion that, while possibly of equal magnitude or emotionality, negative and positive items/events/etc. are not equally salient. Rozin and Royzman note that this characteristic of the negativity bias is only empirically demonstrable in situations with inherent measurability, such as comparing how positively or negatively a change in temperature is interpreted.
With respect to positive and negative gradients, it appears to be the case that negative events are thought to be perceived as increasingly more negative than positive events are increasingly positive the closer one gets (spatially or temporally) to the affective event itself. In other words, there is a steeper negative gradient than positive gradient. For example, the negative experience of an impending dental surgery is perceived as increasingly more negative the closer one gets to the date of surgery than the positive experience of an impending party is perceived as increasingly more positive the closer one gets to the date of celebration (assuming for the sake of this example that these events are equally positive and negative). Rozin and Royzman argue that this characteristic is distinct from that of negative potency because there appears to be evidence of steeper negative slopes relative to positive slopes even when potency itself is low.
Negativity dominance describes the tendency for the combination of positive and negative items/events/etc. to skew towards an overall more negative interpretation than would be suggested by the summation of the individual positive and negative components. Phrasing in more Gestalt-friendly terms, the whole is more negative than the sum of its parts.
Negative differentiation is consistent with evidence suggesting that the conceptualization of negativity is more elaborate and complex than that of positivity. For instance, research indicates that negative vocabulary is more richly descriptive of the affective experience than that of positive vocabulary.[5] Furthermore, there appear to be more terms employed to indicate negative emotions than positive emotions.[6][7] The notion of negative differentiation is consistent with the mobilization-minimization hypothesis,[8] which posits that negative events, as a consequence of this complexity, require a greater mobilization of cognitive resources to deal with the affective experience and a greater effort to minimize the consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
Not all Emotions are Created Equal:
The negativity bias in social-emotional development
Abstract
There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development.
Keywords: Negativity bias, Affective asymmetry, Social-cognitive development, Emotion, Social referencing
Introduction
Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.
While the issue of a negativity bias has not been extensively explored in infant development, it has been explored in myriad lines of adult and animal research. Although the traditional view of the impact of valenced information has been as a bipolar scale with positive and negative information having equal but opposite impact on an organism's behavior (e.g., Thurstone, 1931), much recent research has challenged this assumption. At a very basic psychological level, evidence from learning research indicates a powerful negativity bias: negative reinforcement, as opposed to comparable positive reinforcement, leads to faster learning that is more resistant to extinction in both human adults and in animals (e.g., Garcia, Hankins, & Rusiniak, 1974; Logue, Ophir, & Strauss, 1981; Öhman & Mineka, 2001, for a review).
At a higher cognitive level, negative stimuli are hypothesized to carry greater informational value than positive stimuli, and to thus require greater attention and cognitive processing (see Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). Accordingly, 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 (e.g., Ducette & Soucar, 1974; Fiske, 1980; H. Miller & Bieri, 1965).
At a still more complex level of psychological functioning, the negativity bias has also repeatedly been revealed in adults' judgment and decision-making. When making judgments, people consistently weight the negative aspects of an event or stimulus more heavily than the positive aspects (Kahneman and Tversky, 1984; see Peeters & Czapinski, 1990, for a review). This is also true of impression-formation: when given descriptions of a hypothetical person's moral and immoral behaviors, or adjectives describing the person's good and bad traits, subjects process and use the negative more than the positive information in arriving at a final impression of the person, even when the positive and negative information are equally intense (see Abelson & Kanouse, 1966; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kanouse & Hanson, 1972; but see Skowronski & Carlston, 1987). Furthermore, people need less negative trait information to make trait inferences about others (Aloise, 1993; see also N. H. Anderson, 1965, and Czapinski, 1988).
There is also recent neuroscientific evidence for a negativity bias (e.g., Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998; Schupp et al., 2004). For example, Ito, Larsen, et al. (1998) measured undergraduate students' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as they showed them neutral pictures (as a kind of context) embedded with occasional positive or negative pictures (targets)…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3652533/
What Is Negativity Bias, and How Does It Affect You?
We humans have a tendency to give more importance to negative experiences than to positive or neutral experiences. This is called the negativity bias.
We even tend to focus on the negative even when the negative experiences are insignificant or inconsequential.
Think of the negativity bias like this: You’ve checked into a nice hotel for the evening. When you enter the bathroom, there’s a large spider in the sink. Which do you think will be a more vivid memory: the fine furnishings and luxury appointments of the room, or the spider you encountered?
Most people, according to a 2016 article for Nielsen Norman Group, will remember the spider incident more clearly.
Negative experiences tend to affect people more than positive ones. A 2010 article published by the University of California, Berkeley quotes psychologist Rick Hanson: “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”
Why do people have a negativity bias?
According to psychologist Rick Hanson, a negativity bias has been built into our brains based on millions of years of evolution when it comes to dealing with threats.
Our ancestors lived in difficult environments. They had to gather food while avoiding deadly obstacles.
Noticing, reacting to, and remembering predators and natural hazards (negative) became more important than finding food (positive). Those who avoided the negative situations passed on their genes.
How does the negativity bias show?
Behavioral economics
One of the ways negativity bias is evident is that people, according to another 2016 article for Nielsen Norman Group, is risk aversion: People tend to guard against losses by giving greater significance to even small probabilities.
The negative feelings from losing $50 are stronger than the positive feelings of finding $50. In fact, people will commonly work harder to avoid losing $50 than they will to gain $50.
While humans may not need to be on constant high alert for survival like our ancestors, negative bias can still affect how we act, react, feel, and think.
For example, older research points out that when people make decisions, they put greater importance on the negative event aspects than on the positive. This can affect choices and willingness to take risks.
Social psychology
According to a 2014 article, negativity bias can be found in political ideology.
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Conservatives tend to have stronger physiological responses and devote more psychological resources to negatives than liberals do.
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Also, in an election, voters are more likely to cast their vote for a candidate based on negative information about their opponent as opposed to their candidate’s personal merits.
https://www.healthline.com/health/negativity-bias
Negatively-Biased Credulity and the Cultural Evolution of Beliefs
Daniel M. T. Fessler ,
Abstract
The functions of cultural beliefs are often opaque to those who hold them. Accordingly, to benefit from cultural evolution’s ability to solve complex adaptive problems, learners must be credulous. However, credulity entails costs, including susceptibility to exploitation, and effort wasted due to false beliefs. One determinant of the optimal level of credulity is the ratio between the costs of two types of errors: erroneous incredulity (failing to believe information that is true) and erroneous credulity (believing information that is false). This ratio can be expected to be asymmetric when information concerns hazards, as the costs of erroneous incredulity will, on average, exceed the costs of erroneous credulity; no equivalent asymmetry characterizes information concerning benefits. Natural selection can therefore be expected to have crafted learners’ minds so as to be more credulous toward information concerning hazards. This negatively-biased credulity extends general negativity bias, the adaptive tendency for negative events to be more salient than positive events. Together, these biases constitute attractors that should shape cultural evolution via the aggregated effects of learners’ differential retention and transmission of information. In two studies in the U.S., we demonstrate the existence of negatively-biased credulity, and show that it is most pronounced in those who believe the world to be dangerous, individuals who may constitute important nodes in cultural transmission networks. We then document the predicted imbalance in cultural content using a sample of urban legends collected from the Internet and a sample of supernatural beliefs obtained from ethnographies of a representative collection of the world’s cultures, showing that beliefs about hazards predominate in both.
Introduction
Cultural evolution resembles biological evolution in some respects, and differs in others. As in biological evolution, the impact of information on the fitness of individuals and groups carrying it is a central determinant of the extent to which that information succeeds or fails in the arena of competing variants. However, the pathways for information transmission in cultural evolution are more diverse than in biological evolution [1], [2]. As a consequence, in addition to being driven by the fitness of information carriers, cultural evolution is also shaped by the extent to which a given variant is attractive to, retained by, and transmitted by human minds. The attractiveness, retainability, and transmissibility of a given cultural variant do not hinge solely on its utility, as they are also products of the extent to which the variant is congruent with features of learners’ minds. Patterns evident in a culture at a large scale thus in part reflect features common to the minds of those who hold the given culture, as such patterns are the result of the aggregated propensity of learners to acquire, retain, and transmit some beliefs and practices more than others [3]–[7].
Although a variety of features of learners’ minds have been explored in regard to their impact on cultural evolution, with only a few exceptions [8], [9], the attributes examined are not central to information acquisition and use, and hence their effects on cultural evolution are incidental (e.g., [10]–[12]). We propose that cultural evolution is importantly influenced by two linked features of learners’ minds–general negativity bias and its uniquely human extension, negatively-biased credulity–that play key roles in information acquisition and use. Here, we describe these features, present additional evidence of the existence of negatively-biased credulity, then demonstrate that, consistent with the expected effects of these biases writ large, beliefs about hazards predominate in domains in which information is exclusively social in origin.
Subjective reactions largely track fitness relevance, with fitness-reducing events typically being experienced as negative, i.e., eliciting aversive affective experiences and concomitant cognitions [13]. Negativity bias refers to the manner in which, compared to positive events, negative events more readily capture attention, are stored more readily in memory, are linked to a larger set of cognitions, and have greater motivational impetus [14], [15]. Negativity bias can be understood as reflecting an overarching pattern wherein the avoidance of imminent fitness decrements typically has a greater effect on fitness than does the pursuit of fitness enhancements, as, in general, the latter can be pursued only after the former have been addressed [14], [15].
Existing evidence suggests that negativity bias plays a role in the social transmission of information. News reports that induce fear are judged by viewers to be more important and relevant than those that do not [16]. Public opinion regarding economic outlooks is more strongly influenced by negative reports than by positive ones, even after controlling for the frequency of negative reporting [17]–[19], a pattern paralleled by the asymmetric effects of bad and good news regarding consumer sentiment on the stock market [20], [21]. At the affective level, eliciting negative emotions and related states should facilitate social transmission. Correspondingly, disgust, a negative emotion, figures prominently in past research: participants report greater likelihood of transmission for both non-social [22], [23] and social [24] information that elicits disgust, and they pursue information as a function of disgust content [22]. Disgust elicitation correspondingly predicts the distribution of urban legends [23], and is implicated in the longevity of etiquette rules [25]. More broadly, rumors reporting undesirable events spread more rapidly and more widely than those reporting desirable events, even when they are of equal importance and believability [26]. Arousal is a determinant of willingness to transmit information [27], and negative events generally elicit greater arousal than positive events [14], [15]. News reports that evoke high-arousal emotions are more likely to ‘go viral’ on the Internet, and anxiety is a principal driver in this regard [28]. Likewise, as both a state and a trait, anxiety is linked to the propensity to acquire and transmit rumors [29]–[34].
Evaluating pragmatic considerations such as impression management and informational utility, rumor researchers have also explored the positive contribution of credulity – how much the information is believed – to social transmission [31], [33], [35], [36]. Although not generally framed in these terms by students of rumor, the question of credulity can be seen as intimately linked to negativity bias. Contemplating the proximate cognitive mechanisms that contribute to credulity, Hilbig [37]–[39] proposed that negativity bias should extend to this realm, i.e., what he terms “negative information” should be more readily believed than “positive information”. It is important to underscore that most work on negativity bias concerns salience, memorability, and motivational impact – all factors that are logically distinct from credulity per se.
Building on previous basic research on negativity bias, investigations regarding communication about risks posed by technology indicate that people are indeed more likely to believe reports indicating that products are dangerous than they are to believe reports indicating that they are safe [40]–[43]. However, while noteworthy, such research does not reveal the extent to which these effects generalize beyond the topic of product safety. In multiple studies employing information concerning a broad range of topics, Hilbig [37]–[39] has demonstrated that, as predicted, negatively-framed information (much of which concerns the possibility of adverse outcomes) is believed at a higher rate than is positively-framed information. Follow-up studies reveal that this effect is not due to differences in the retrieval of prior knowledge, but instead likely stems from differences in processing fluency, and thus constitutes a true response bias [39]. Hilbig concludes by briefly noting that this bias may be functional, as fluency “often yields ecological validity” [39]. To the extent that Hilbig’s negatively- and positively-framed stimulus statements can respectively be construed as concerning hazards or opportunities, his suggestion of a functional bias articulates well with broader approaches that explain negativity bias as reflecting an evolutionary history characterized by the greater exigency of situations having the potential to decrease fitness relative to that of situations having the potential to enhance fitness [14], [15].
Consonant with the ubiquity of the asymmetrical fitness implications of hazards versus benefits, negativity bias occurs in many species [15]. Humans, however, diverge from other organisms in our reliance on culture, an attribute that has plausibly shaped the extension of negativity bias into the domain of social information transmission. Specifically, we argue that a consideration of the asymmetry in the costs attending credulity and incredulity across different categories of socially transmitted information provides an ultimate explanation for what we term negatively-biased credulity, an account that complements Hilbig’s proximate model of this phenomenon.
Humans are unique in both (a) their reliance on cultural information in addressing environmental and social adaptive challenges, and (b) the extent of their ability to acquire, use, improve, and transmit information from conspecifics, processes that, aggregated over time, generate a progressively larger corpus of useful cultural information. Importantly, if learners are to take advantage of the power of cultural evolution to solve fitness-relevant problems, they must be credulous. This is because not only is the utility of a belief or practice often not self-evident, but, moreover, it is frequently opaque to adherents, who often provide functionally extraneous rationales for their actions [44], [45]. However, credulity is accompanied by multiple costs. First, self-interested actors may deceive learners in order to exploit them [46]. Second, credulity increases the likelihood that non- or dys-functional beliefs and practices will be acquired, with subsequent declines in individual fitness [44].
The above considerations indicate that natural selection can be expected to have shaped the psychological mechanisms that play a role in culture acquisition so as to maximize the benefit/cost ratio of credulity [46]. An important factor in this equation will be the relative costs of two different types of errors, namely erroneous incredulity (failing to believe information that is true) and erroneous credulity (believing information that is false). Viewed in the larger context of issues of signal detection, these errors can be conceptualized, respectively, as false negatives and false positives. Whenever decision-making systems must act on the basis of imperfect information, a critical consideration is whether the relative costs of these two types of errors differ. By way of analogy, consider the design of household smoke detectors [47], [48]. It is prohibitively expensive to create smoke detectors that are perfectly accurate (i.e., devices that never sound an alarm in the absence of an actual fire, and always sound an alarm when a fire occurs). Smoke detectors should therefore be set to produce the less-costly error, namely false positives – we suffer the irritation of false alarms whenever we burn a piece of toast in order to enjoy the security of knowing that we will be alerted if a fire breaks out. The same considerations apply in the case of decision-making machinery crafted by natural selection, such that investigators should observe a consistent bias in the direction of whatever constitutes the less-costly error [47]–[55].
To understand how the above considerations apply to the question of credulity, consider two classes of cultural information, namely information concerning fitness-reducing hazards (e.g., which animals are dangerous, which plants are poisonous, which outgroups are hostile, etc.), and information concerning fitness-enhancing benefits (e.g., which animals are meaty, which plants are edible, which outgroups are friendly, etc.). With regard to cultural information concerning hazards, erroneous incredulity (i.e., a false-negative reaction) entails the costs suffered upon encountering the given hazard, while erroneous credulity (i.e., a false-positive reaction) entails only the costs of having taken unnecessary precautions. In the environments in which ancestral human populations evolved, ignoring accurate cultural information regarding hazards will often have led to serious injury or death, outcomes far more dire than the loss of time, energy, and opportunities resulting from having taken unnecessary precautions. Accordingly, in regard to cultural information concerning hazards, the costs of false negatives will have been larger on average than the costs of false positives. However, the situation is very different with regard to cultural information concerning benefits, as a false negative in this context (i.e., not believing cultural information that is, in fact, true) entails the costs of failing to exploit a useful opportunity, while a false positive (i.e., believing cultural information that is false) entails the costs of fruitlessly pursuing a spurious possibility. These respective costs will vary substantially from instance to instance; as a consequence, in contrast to the case of information concerning hazards, no overarching asymmetry is likely to have characterized this ratio in ancestral environments.
Given the greater costs of incredulity toward information concerning hazards relative to the costs of credulity toward such information, we should expect natural selection to have crafted a bias toward enhanced credulity. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists with regard to information concerning benefits, credulity in the latter domain should simply reflect the degree to which social learning is more advantageous than trial-and-error learning [45], [56]. Negatively-biased credulity can thus be understood as the output of a functional mechanism that enhances credulity toward socially transmitted information concerning hazards relative to the baseline level of credulity with which the individual approaches socially transmitted information concerning benefits.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095167
