Psychology: Our perception is too negative – and that has consequences

Sometimes it’s hard to process all the dark news of the past year. Wars raged and raged in Ukraine, the Middle East and many other places, the divided German federal government collapsed, floods of the century devastated the country in many countries, people died in the attack on the Magdeburg Christmas market and there were numerous deaths in passenger plane crashes.

All of this stays in your memory. Much more so than the billions of people who met each other peacefully every day. Or the countless planes that landed safely. Or the good news, for example that deforestation in the Amazon was decreasing or Germany celebrated the European Football Championship in its own country.

What applies to world events also applies to private life: negative things stay in your head more than positive things. People are more likely to remember the one negative comment about the new hairstyle than the many positive comments about it.

“While a word of criticism can destroy us, we can be left indifferent when someone showers us with praise. We see that one hostile face in the crowd, while we miss many a friendly smile,” write US social psychologist Roy Baumeister and the American science journalist John Tierney in their 2019 book “The Power of Bad”.

Even a single strongly negative experience can trigger a lifelong trauma, and there is no positive equivalent, the two write. They call all of this the “negativity effect” or “negativity dominance”, in English “negativity bias”.

In their book, Baumeister and Tierney also refer to the phenomenon as the “distorting power of the negative” and describe it as a “human tendency to be more influenced by negative events and emotions than by positive ones.”

Psychologists Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman showed in a 2020 study that the amount of negative emotions in people is usually disproportionately high. More than 90 percent of the worries that people worry about every day are completely useless – because the problems they worry about never happen.

Its cause seems to be the negativity effect in evolution – because it used to have a purpose: thousands of years ago it was important for survival because it was highly relevant for people back then to remember which fruits were difficult to digest or even poisonous, where bears lived or hunted predators. So focusing on these dangers saved lives back then.

This still applies today, for example when people are more careful when driving because we know the stories of horror accidents. However, the effect is also a great danger: the dominance of negativity destroys the reputation of individuals because the focus is on their mistakes, write Baumeister and Tierney. He leads companies into bankruptcy when shareholders have heard that they are doing badly.

The effect also promotes tribalism, racism, groundless fears and anger towards refugees, for example, because stories about dangerous criminals are more likely to be remembered among them than stories about the peaceful ones. In addition, the dominance of negativity poisons the political public and ensures that demagogues are elected because they take advantage of people’s fears and worries.

Christian Unkelbach is a social psychologist at the University of Cologne, and the negativity effect is one of his core topics. According to him, it’s basically about the fact that, on average, negative information gets more attention from people than positive information. They would also be processed more deeply and would have more influence on our decisions.

Unkelbach also uses evolution as a classic explanation: “Let’s assume, in extremely simplified terms, that ancestor A pays more attention to negative information than ancestor B. Ancestor A then discovers the predator before ancestor B; A escapes and B is eaten.”

The more cautious person who memorizes negative information about dangers better lives longer. In doing so, he also passes this approach on through genes and upbringing.

Unkelbach’s research team also has an approach to explaining how learning processes take place. Outside of the news, negative information is much rarer than positive information, and also much more diverse, since there are many more ways to be bad than there are ways to be good. “People pay more attention to rare information – and the higher diversity leads to deeper processing,” explains Unkelbach.

In today’s everyday life, the effect could also be an advantage – for example if the negative information that milk goes bad quickly leads people to pay attention and never drink bad milk.

But according to Unkelbach, there is also an “almost tragic consequence” of this actually useful effect. “People experience the world as harsh, unfriendly and negative. If you put together all the negative information in a news day, wars, hunger, social problems and general injustice, life looks bleak.”

There are hardly any areas in which the negativity effect is as pronounced as in media consumption, says Unkelbach. This not only applies to news that is dominated by negative headlines, but also to entertainment media.

“Since entertainment also means variety and negative information is more diverse, negative media content is often more varied and therefore more entertaining,” explains the social psychologist. “A film about a happy relationship and everyday, normal life is less entertaining than a film about a breakup and the arguments that come with it.”

The negativity effect also plays a role in politics; after all, people focus more on the mistakes of governments and politicians than on their achievements. A single lie is remembered much more than many different true statements, says Unkelbach. The integrity of politicians suffers as a result, which can lead to disillusionment with politics.

But what can people do against this evolutionary imprint? According to Unkelbach, “an active focus on the positive experiences in life can be helpful.” For example, some people write a diary in which they record positive stories.

In addition, politics and the media must manage to “generate interesting and varied positive content,” says Unkelbach. “However, it is also the responsibility of the media to highlight grievances and problems.”

It can help to know that the media and politics always focus on problems and negative things and that the world is not always well represented as a result, he says. So perhaps just knowing about the negativity effect could help you not to let it bring you down.

Baumeister and Tierney also confirm this in their book: “By seeing through the negativity effect and overcoming our innate reactions, we can break through destructive patterns and look more positively – more effectively – into the future.” This is now more important than ever in the digital world, “which increases the power of the negative.” The rational part of our brain can help us to break away from the outdated focus on the negative and instead turn to the positive.