This is the 2nd lecture of [[Roy Baumeister]]'s [[PA Big Ideas in Psychology]] focusing on ideas in and extending from his paper "Bad is stronger than good" ## Ubiquity A basic fact about the mind is that it thinks "bad is stronger than the good," or what others would call a negativity bias. Good is good, but bad is very bad. Positive psychology took over a century after the down of psychology because bad effects are harder to find, because they are stronger than good effects. Different ways and variations: - Psychologists studied first impressions — perceived bad traits weighted more heavily - Economists identified loss aversion — rather win little to none than to lose much - [[Roy Baumeister]] rejection studies showed that rejection hits harder than acceptance ## Examples **Lingering emotional effects:** Bad things have a lingering emotional effect. This is true on a day-to-day timeframe. This is also true on a longer timeframe, as adjustment to bad events occur slower than adjustment to good events. That is also why we have the term trauma to mean negative events with lifetime impact, but no positive equivalent. **Stress vs growth**: However, with post-traumatic stress also comes post-traumatic growth—the latter is more commont than the former. Marty Seligman—founder of positive psychology—argued that by only emphasizing the stress but not the growth, we are creating an expectation of having to suffer and be miserable after negative events. **Relationships:** The largest predictor of long-lasting relationships is the proportion of the amount of times they have sex to the amount of times they fight, know as the Gottman ratio. A healthy couple would have 5x times times as much sex as the amount of times they fight. 3x to 4x is the breakeven point. 2x is a low number and a predictor for disaster. If we see fighting as the negative event, and sex as the positive, then negative events have 5x impact on the relationship. **Learning:** Negative outcomes trigger more learning and thinking. "You win or you learn." **Perceiving emotions:** We are able to perceive angry faces in a crowd much faster than happy faces due to our awareness to danger. **Language:** Across languages, there are several times more words for negative emotions than positive ones. **Self-control:** A large part of growing up is to learn self-control, and that is just another way of saying emotional regulation. **Memories:** Negative memories stick out more than good ones, even despite the presence of defense mechanisms. **Making friends (and enemies):** In social psychology, there is a study done in a Stanford dorm about what made people friends. The answer with the largest impact was closeness.[^1] Another study was done 20 years later that showed that what predicted who became enemies was also closeness.[^2] The enemy effect is stronger than the friend effect, meaning people are more likely to become enemies with their neighbors than become friends. **Social support:** Negative support has a greater impact than positive impact. Affirms the sentiment that no teammate is better than bad teammate. **Parental impact:** impact is mostly in the negative direction as well. The upward limit of intelligence is largely genetic, but downward limit can very much be influenced by the parents. Parents can make their children dumber, not smarter. Peer group have a largely impact than parents in general. **Information processing:** people think more about bad news and information than good ones. **Morality:** doing a lot of good may not be enough to offset doing a little bad. **Stereotypes:** bad stereotypes form faster than positive stereotypes. **Reaction to feedback:** the motive to not look bad (self-protect) is stronger than the motive to look good (self-enhance). ## How much stronger? The rule of four: bad effects is 4x stronger. The Gottman ratio suggests 4-5x stronger in relationships. 2x seems to be the number for money things. ## Implications **Entertainment** focuses on negative things, because they are entertaining. **Politics** focuses on the bad things about their opponent. **Media** focus on bad things, as a symptom of a larger phenomenon called safety addiction, where people are obsessed with safety precautions and disaster prevention out of an irrational fear of things going wrong despite our world being safer than it has ever been. The crisis crisis is the phrase to describe the ongoing exaggeration of everything deemed a crisis. In regular life, avoid bad things and cultivate good things, but avoiding bad things takes priority because it has a much larger impact. Following the rule of four means doing four good things to overcome one bad things. Lead with bad news when giving reviews. Forget about being perfect, focus on being good enough, and at least not bad. [^1]: Festinger, Leon, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back. _Social Pressures in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing_. New York: Harper, 1950. [^2]: Ebbesen, Ebbe B., Glenn L. Kjos, and Vladimir J. Konečni. “Spatial Ecology: Its Effects on the Choice of Friends and Enemies.” _Journal of Experimental Social Psychology_ 12, no. 6 (November 1976): 505–518. DOI:10.1016/0022-1031(76)90030-5. --- Back to: [[PA Big Ideas in Psychology]] Previous Lecture: [[The Need to Belong]]