Negativity bias
If you’ve ever been ditched by someone you loved, you will immediately grasp the thrust of Roy Baumeister’s new book, The Power of Bad. The pain of being rejected will stay with you long after you have forgotten the half-dozen mildly satisfactory relationships that petered out through mutual indifference. “Bad is stronger than good,” he tells me. “Failure has a bigger impact than success. This pattern occurs everywhere in life.”
The academic name for the power of bad is “negativity bias”, defined in the book as “the universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones”. Baumeister says negativity bias can’t be completely suppressed, but it can be helpfully channelled. “We can control our negativity bias and not get swept away by it,” he says. “Good can prevail if we know what we’re up against.” He demurs from calling it a self-help book – preferring to see it as “a book about how the mind works” – but accepts that “people looking to help themselves can get useful information out of it”.
The power of bad doesn’t just affect individuals; it infects societies. And Baumeister reckons journalists, by doubling as doom-mongers, are among the worst offenders. “Life is great and things are going well,” he says, “but journalists are constantly predicting one disaster after another because that’s what sells newspapers and magazines.” Programmed to believe the worst, the public warms to the apocalyptic.
Baumeister is a softly spoken America-born psychologist in his mid-60s who is now a professor at the University of Queensland. He has written almost 40 books, helpfully broken down by Wikipedia into “academic”, “crossover” and “general”. He had a big success in 2011 with Willpower – a how-to book helping us to improve our self-control (if only!) which was co-written with journalist John Tierney. The two have teamed up again for The Power of Bad, marrying Baumeister’s academic research with Tierney’s more populist, story-telling approach.
Tierney, whom I don’t meet, is a climate change sceptic, and I suggest to Baumeister that his co-author’s views make the sections of the book that cover environmentalism rather panglossian. “I certainly want to pass on the planet to future generations and it’s good we’re taking steps,” Baumeister says in his measured mid-western way. “Energy is cheaper than it was in the past and there’s a lot less pollution. The history of the environmental movement is to predict one disaster after another, and they’ve never come anywhere close to being as bad as thought. To motivate people to take action, they think they have to say ‘London and New York are going to be underwater in a few years’. But it’s probably not going to be that bad.”
He accepts that climate change is happening and that some species will struggle as habitats change, but believes humans will cope just fine. In his view, it’s negativity bias that predisposes us to believe otherwise and accept what the doomsayers predict. “The power of bad means that the mind is attuned to the worst-case scenario,” he argues. “I care about the climate. I just wish environmentalists hadn’t lost so much credibility by predicting one disaster after another that never came. The first was [Rachel Carson’s book] Silent Spring, which predicted that pretty soon there aren’t going to be any more birds. Well, I’m sure some birds died, but we still have birds.”
The book offers a rule-of-thumb calculation that one bad event will have an impact on our psyche equivalent to four good ones – the authors, echoing a best-selling American novel, call it the “rule of four”. But why are we more influenced by bad than good? “Given how universal it is, it’s probably grounded in evolution,” Baumeister says. “It’s more important to avoid dangers and bad things than to react to good things. If you fail to notice a predator or eat something that poisonous, that will kill you. Whereas missing out on some positive opportunity for good food or pleasure or sex or whatever – it’s unfortunate to miss out on it, but you live to find another one the next day. So there has to be a priority on bad in evolutionary terms.”
Baumeister says our brains are programmed to fear the worst and to over-react. And it’s not just humans; animals do it too. “When I was working in Florida, I used to go jogging through the wildlife area,” he recalls. “I was never going to attack a bird, but as soon as the birds heard us coming, my dog and me, they’d take off. They didn’t wait around to see if we had good intentions. The safe thing is to react as if we were dangerous. Erring on the side of caution is what our ancestors who survived and reproduced did.”
He says two groups had previously recognised the power of bad: economists, who had noticed that people got more upset about losing money than gaining the same amount, and that the resultant “loss aversion” biased their decisions; and sports people, who found the pain of losing greater than the joy of winning, which often made teams too negative towards the end of contests – an approach that often produced the loss they were desperate to avoid.
Baumeister says that if we fail collectively to counteract negativity bias, you end up with a sclerotic, risk-averse society. “We become scared of everything,” he says, arguing that health and safety rules and fear of failure can lead to a “Never do anything for the first time” mentality. He cites opposition to vaping, which he says can help people give up harmful cigarettes but is now itself getting a bad press from the anti-smoking lobby. “The crisis industry wants to send out alarms and scare people away from it,” he says, “which means condemning lots of smokers to continuing to smoke.”
Our conversation is becoming surprisingly political. The power of bad looks, in Baumeister and Tierney’s eyes at least, like a reason why we prefer to prop up the status quo, because taking risks and making radical changes is something humans are reluctant to do. The right, intent on challenging political correctness and overturning orthodoxies, will love the book, I suggest. “John is a libertarian, and to the extent that I have political views I suppose I am sympathetic to the libertarian view as well,” says Baumeister. “I’m sympathetic to the left in terms of tolerance for everybody, and I’m sympathetic to the right in terms of the free market doing a better job of allocating resources than the government. But we still need government regulation; an unchecked free market produces abuses.”
Baumeister thinks “safety addiction” is a particular problem for the young. “It comes because of parents getting inordinately worried about very tiny risks,” he says. A few well-publicised cases of stranger danger, where strangers have kidnapped a child, have produced a generation of terrified parents who overprotect their children. “There’s much more danger to your child riding in the car with you than being abducted by strangers,” he says, “but a few of these stories have pressed parents’ buttons, so now people are afraid to let their children walk home. When I was 10 I walked to school and back every day. Both my parents were working. I had a key chain on my belt so I could let myself into the house when I got home. That’s healthy. Children are brought up being protected from everything, and then they get to university and they’re not used to being on their own or finding ideas that challenge their beliefs.”
He takes what might be called a robust approach to parenting. He thinks the “self-esteem movement”, which suggests that criticising children can be damaging, is wrong-headed. “It’s not that good a preparation for life,” he says. “How will these people fare when they get out into the business world, where you do indeed fail?” He also dislikes grade inflation and the “all must have prizes” mentality, which is bad for society because the system fails to identify the truly talented and bad for the students, who may eventually discover that their good degrees don’t translate into good jobs because the number of people with those high grades is so large.
That view seems hard to fit into his power of bad paradigm. After all, if bad experiences are so powerful, you would think we should be giving children all the support we can. But he says that is outweighed by the fact that we learn more from criticism, which is painful but necessary if we want to learn and make progress. It should be tempered by praise, he says, but there does need to be stick as well as carrot; otherwise children are being misled and poorly prepared for what is to follow. Negativity bias means the criticism is likely to weigh more heavily than the praise, but that isn’t a reason not to criticise.
According to Baumeister, as you get older you become less sensitive to criticism: in part because you can cite past successes to counteract current failures, but also because older people are less learning oriented than the young and spend less time fretting over negative comments. “In the laboratory you can give exactly the same negative stimulus [to old and young people], and young people dwell on it much more,” he says. “Their brain reactions show a lot more activity.” It’s one reason why older people tend to be happier than the young. “They don’t react to it as much,” he says. “They just don’t think about it.” The old are not immune to the power of bad, but experience has taught them the joy of perspective.
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