The Power of Bad

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The Wall Street Journal:

According to cable news, the state of California and your mother, dangers are lurking everywhere, requiring ever more urgent warnings about how we eat, travel, breathe and live. But despite the pervasive sentiment that things are terrible and getting worse, people today are “richer, healthier, freer, and safer than our ancestors could have ever hoped to be,” write John Tierney and Roy Baumeister. How is it that “the luckiest people in history feel cursed”?

One answer is the tendency for “negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones”—the so-called negativity bias. This idea is at the heart of “The Power of Bad,” a Gladwellian mix of cultural observation, social-science research and self-help. Messrs. Tierney and Baumeister—an iconoclastic science journalist and a research psychologist, respectively, and the authors of “Willpower” (2011)—are keen to make us aware of habits of thought that divert joy into sorrow and “produce needless personal angst and destructive public policies.”

Negativity, they concede, is in some ways adaptive, promoting survival of the species, since “life has to win every day” while “death has to win just once.” But the asymmetry of such thinking in everyday life has negative effects in itself. It “distorts our emotions and our view of the world,” the authors write, and it seems to crop up everywhere.

. . . .

NFL coaches punt on fourth down far more frequently than statistics say they should, apparently because they worry disproportionately about having to explain the inevitable failures to convert. We exhibit similar biases about our own finances, where the fear of loss is greater than the pleasure of gain.

. . . .

Negative talk is destructive in marital relations, the authors note, and bad (or nonexistent) sexual relations, according to one psychologist, can decrease a couple’s happiness by 50%-75%. 

. . . .

Similarly, in the workplace the damage that a single jerk can do tends to be far greater than the benefit of several model employees. “The first order of business,” according to Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor quoted by the authors, “should be to eliminate the negative, not accentuate the positive.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (sorry if you run into a paywall)