How to Overcome Your Brain’s Fixation on Bad Things

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Why can’t we pull our attention away from a traffic accident or stop watching news about the latest viral outbreak? Why are we waylaid by criticism or unable to get past a minor snub from our best friend?

That’s our negativity bias. We humans have a propensity to give more weight in our minds to things that go wrong than to things that go right—so much so that just one negative event can hijack our minds in ways that can be detrimental to our work, relationships, health, and happiness.

Overcoming our negativity bias is not easy to do. But a new book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, coauthored by social psychologist Roy Baumeister and New York Times writer John Tierney, inspires hope. The book not only covers the fascinating science behind this stubborn bias, but also gives readers practical tips to work around it in effective—and sometimes counterintuitive—ways. If we know that “bad” is stronger than “good,” the authors argue, we can use that knowledge to improve not only our own lives, but society at large.

Recently, I spoke with the authors about their book and what we can learn from it. Below is an edited version of our interview.

Jill Suttie: Why did you want to write about the power of the negativity bias?

Roy Baumeister: To me, it was fascinating, because it’s one of the most basic psychological principles and seems to be true everywhere. It’s a key fact about how the mind works. But there are also plenty of practical applications in everyday life that people need to understand—how it works in their relationships, in their reactions to political and religious speakers, and so on. A mind is prone to overreact to negative things relative to positive things; so people can use this to manipulate us, or we can use this to manipulate other people. If we understand this, we can prevent some of the negative effects and improve the quality of our social life.

JS: What was one of the most surprising findings from the research on negativity bias?

John Tierney: There are lots of little surprising things to me—like the fact that you get almost no credit for doing more than you promised to do, for going beyond and doing extra, but you get penalized severely for what you don’t do.

Researchers did experiments where students were given tickets by a ticket broker, and if the seats were better than expected, the students didn’t express any gratitude; but they were very upset if the seats were worse. In another experiment, someone came in to help participants do a task that involved solving puzzles, and if that person did 50 percent more than promised, participants gave him the same rating as if he’d just done the basic job. If he fell short, they really faulted him. We’re very upset when someone doesn’t fulfill a promise, but if they do extra, we’re not grateful enough for it.

RB: If I had to pick one finding, in particular, it would be that people learn more and faster from punishment and reward. I’ve heard educators say that we shouldn’t criticize students or shouldn’t give bad marks; but giving both reward and punishment—both praise and criticism—is best, for informational purposes. If you have to pick just one, the negative feedback stimulates learning faster than the positive. That was the biggest surprise to me.

For example, say you give children a jar, and, in one condition, every time they got a right answer, they’d get a marble to put in a jar that they could keep. In the other condition, the jar was full of marbles, and every time they got one wrong, they’d lose a marble. It’s the same contingency, one marble per answer. But the kids learned faster when they were losing marbles than gaining marbles.

There was also a nice field study with teachers, where they were given a bonus if enough of their kids improved or reached grade-level-appropriate scores at the end of the year. To make it interesting, half the teachers got the bonus in advance—but if their students didn’t make it, they’d have to pay it back. The others were told they would get their bonus at the end of the year if students advanced. The result? Students learn better when the teacher might be punished by having money taken away, instead of rewarded by getting money in the end.

JS: In your book, you refer to the “Negative Golden Rule.” Can you explain what that is and why it’s important in relationships?

RB: Well, the standard Golden Rule that we learned as a child is “Do unto others as you want them to do unto you.” But given that bad is stronger than good, the priority should be “Do not do unto others what you do not want done unto you.” It’s about focusing on eliminating the...