SYSK TRENDING - How the Negativity Effect Rules Us

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1:00There's actually a reason for that. It's called the negativity effect, our tendency to give bad experiences, bad news and criticism more weight than equally positive things. And it can influence everything from your relationships and career to what you buy, what you worry about, and how you see the world. That's why today's SYSK trending topic is how the negativity effect rules us. So why does your brain seem so determined to focus on what's wrong? John Tierney is a science journalist and in my conversation with him, he explains why bad is so powerful and how understanding that can help you keep negativity from running your life. And we'll be back with that insight right after this. Here's an interesting test. Look in your closet and ask yourself, how much of this stuff do I actually wear? Because I have plenty of clothes, but there are maybe a dozen things I wear over and over again and more and more of them are from quints.

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3:08Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash sysk. You've probably heard of something called negativity bias or the negativity effect, which is basically that we tend to pay attention to and are more motivated by negative things than by positive things. That it hurts more to lose $10 than it feels good to get $10. And it seems to be human nature, but there's so much more to it than that. And understanding how the negativity effect works and how you can use it in a positive way is really interesting. John Tierney is a writer who along with social psychologist Roy Baummeister has researched and written a book called The Power of Bad, how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it.

4:11Hi John, welcome. Hi Mike, thanks for inviting me. So since you're the expert and you wrote the book on it, explain the power of bad. Well the power of bad is the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and bad emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. You know, when you hear a mix of compliments and criticism, you obsess over the criticism instead of enjoying the praise. You know, when you walk into a room and you see a bunch of faces, you focus on the hostile one and you miss all the smiles. And you know, and this negativity effect that just skews the way we see the world that skews our decisions and our relationship. It is isn't it true? I mean, so our podcast has hundreds and hundreds of reviews on Apple podcasts and all that and most of them are glowing. Most of them are great. People love this podcast, but guess which ones I know I take, I take their notice on. And the ones you can't forget, it's just the same thing seven us, you know, the power of bad when the reviews came out, you know, they've been generally very good, but it's the one sentence here or the one, you know, cranky guy who posts a review.

5:21Who you think never really actually read the book. There must be a reason why we do this. Why we're so drawn to the negative and I imagine it has something to do with our survival as a species or some sort of evolutionary thing. Right. It's adaptive as evolution biologists call it that it helped our ancestors survive because it was much more important to pay attention to threats like, you know, like a hungry lion. Then it was to save other good things, you know, you really had to pay attention not to eat poison as berries instead of enjoying, you know, the great meals. And it's more important to pay attention to an enemy who might kill you or might ruin your life in some way than to be nice to a friend because a friend can't do that much good for you or an enemy can really do bad stuff. So, you know, to survive life has to win every day, death only has to win once. So the brain is just primed to look out for those threats. And it's still useful. I mean, it's still important to pay attention to bad stuff and we learn more from bad stuff. So it's a great teaching and motivational tool.

6:27But the problem is we argue is that there's, and we're in this high bad environment now where we're just surrounded by people, the merchants of bad, as we call them, who are trying to scare us, who are trying to get our attention. We know the easiest way to get our attention, whether on television, on a smartphone app, on anything, on social media, the easiest way to get your attention is with something bad because the brain immediately pays attention. Well, and you've been a journalist so you know that the old saying that if it bleeds, it leads because people are drawn to the violent, to the bloody, to the, to the bad. You know, and I found myself guilty of this throughout my career. It's how I got interested when I noticed myself early. I was a somewhere intern and I found myself ridiculously hypening this weather story to make it sound like, you know, Armageddon. And I just wondered, why am I doing this and why, and why do readers want to seal this bad news? And, and the answer for mass media is that it's just the easiest way to get attention.

7:27The good news today is that, you know, podcasts like yours are, you know, that that's a whole different form now. And social media tends to be more positive than mass media. I mean, we hear about the Twitter wars. There's, you know, there's an awful lot of vitriol on social media, but there's much more positivity. You know, people tend to share positive things more than negative things. When you tweet positively, you actually get more followers than people who tweet negatively. And, you know, I mean, you know, these new outlets like, you know, podcasts like this, it gives people a chance to listen for an extended time to something that really interests them, you know, some positive thing that interests them. So knowing that this is very pervasive, it's basically human nature. How, how do we use it in a positive way when it is in itself not? You can put bad moments to good use, you know, that instead of despairing at a setback, you know, override your gut reaction and look for use, for useful lesson.

8:28You know, the upside of the negativity effect is its power to teach and to motivate. You know, penalties are usually more effective than rewards, at spurring students and workers, you know, to improve. They've done clever experiments watching how kids learn. If you give them a marble for a right answer, you take a marble away for the wrong one, you know, taking the marble away, the penalty, they learn much faster that way. Religions that emphasize health tend to grow much more quickly. They fill the future suns on them more than ones that are very benevolent. And, you know, there's even evidence that in countries where more people believe in hell, there's a lower crime rate, more of a deterrent. So, and one of the problems that we see in today's education system is that we've gone to this, everybody gets a trophy philosophy. And as a result, students are learning less, there's been ramping grade inflation. So, you know, the average grade of college now is an A minus. So students are learning less than in the past. And it's because we're not using penalties well enough.

9:30I mean, you want to do both. You want to reward people for good work, but you don't want to just do this, everybody gets a trophy when they don't do good work. But there is a general consensus among people, not necessarily you and people that study this, but I think there's a general consensus in the population that positive reinforcement is better than negative feedback. I mean, there's two reasons why we have that, you know, that idea. One is the self-esteem movement, you know, from the 1970s and 80s, which is one of the staryer mistakes in the history of psychology. That my co-author, Roy Balmyster, who is one of the leading social psychologists, he started his career, think, you know, in that self-esteem research and thought it looked very promising because people saw that kids with high self esteem do well. And they thought that's what caused it. When in fact, Roy and others found out, was it no, that's not how it works. That yes, people who are successful have high self esteem. But the causation is they have high self esteem because they're successful, just having high self esteem doesn't help you.

10:32So that's one of the reasons. The other reason, and this whole idea that the carrot is more effective than the stick. We traced the history of Act Lee Shae. It goes back to the 19th century when there were cartoons and people would advise parents that it's more effective to use a carrot than a stick. And they would tell us fable about, you know, that's how you got a donkey to move better was to put a carrot there instead of using a stick. And the question we ask is, has anyone ever seen a donkey move that way? I mean, you know, when you look at the horses and the winter circle, they can tuck you there, but you don't see any carrots dangling there. You know, the jockeys have whips. And our conclusion is that the reason we think that encouragement works better is because it's a lot more pleasant to give encouragement than it is to criticize. You know, people would rather say nice things. It's a lot less stressful when you evaluate someone just to tell them lots of nice things and let it go with that. So it's more pleasant to give praise, but it's much more effective to give a mix of both because the criticism is really where people learn.

11:34One of the things people struggle with is what is that mix? What is too much and what is not enough? Well, we talk about the rule of four. And that is that, and this is based on a lot of different research into how people respond to financial gains and losses. You know, researchers who study how many good days someone has versus how many bad days, how many good emotions versus how many bad emotions to see what seems to work. And the general rule is that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. That's the rule of four as we call it. And you know, and it's a useful rule of thumb. It means that if you're late for one meeting, you're not going to make up for it by being early the next time. If you say one hurtful thing, you need to say, you know, at least four good things to make up for that. And one of the unfortunate things has been this idea of the criticism sandwich where you start out with lots of good things for the person and then you slip in a little criticism and then you say a few nice things and that's it.

12:39The problem is if you say all the good stuff first and then you say the criticism, the criticism just hits the brain so hard that it forgets all the stuff that came before. And so the person walks out of the meeting, all they can think of is the bad stuff and they've forgotten all the good stuff. So our advice is to get the criticism done early because and then the brains on high alert and then you say the praise and try to say more than four bits of praise for every bit of criticism. And you know, and give the criticism and you can do it in a positive way saying this didn't work last year, but here's a way that we're going to deal with it next year and things are going to be better than ever. So you don't want the person walking out to moralize, but you've got to make sure that they hear what's going wrong so they can improve. We're talking about the negativity bias, the negativity effect and my guest is John Tierney who is co-author of the book, The Power of Bad, how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it.

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15:48Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply need the right hire fast and this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. So John, one of the things in fact I just recently spoke with someone about relationships and they said well your constructive criticism is still criticism and that you're better off at least in a personal relationship like a marriage to shine a light on the positive things people do. And ignore the bad ones because it by praising the good things they'll do more of them. That's true. I was speaking there about when you're a teacher or you're a supervisor who's evaluating someone and your job is to get them to improve. So in that sense you've got to do the criticism in personal relationships. You also when there's something wrong when there's something really seriously wrong you have to talk about it.

16:52But in general in relationships it's great the more you can tamp down the negativity and stress the positivity the better it is. You know we pride ourselves on the many good things we do for our family and our friends for going the extra mile. But what really matters is what we don't do. You know avoiding bad is far more important than doing good. You get relatively little credit for doing more than you promise but you pay a big price if you fall short of a promise. And researchers who've tracked couples over time to see which marriages survive and which ones don't. They find that it depends mainly on how spouses deal with negativity. You want to avoid saying hurtful things, you want to avoid doing hurtful things. And you also want to give your partner a break. In really successful marriages people maintain what researchers call positive illusions. In fact there's some great brain scanning experiments where the part of their brain that makes negative judgments shuts down when they look at a picture of their partner.

17:56They've learned how to do this and the great thing is that when you have these positive illusions about your partner they eventually start believing them too. And they're not realistically high. And it works for both of you. So I mean it is really important to avoid needless negative things. To give your partner the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. Don't assume that because they did something that bothers you that they were a cell face or that they were trying to hurt you. So assume that there might have been some other reason for it. Look for that other reason. And also really capitalize on the good moments. A research was used as term capitalization to talk about how you can put those good moments and those good comments and good thoughts to use. One of the simplest techniques and since I did study this research I try to do it every day. When you have good news share it with someone because sharing it makes it much more powerful.

18:56And when you hear someone's good news don't just sit there quietly nodding. Do something like say that's great. Ask some questions about it. Talk about it. It makes the trying more significant. It makes both of you feel better. It makes you feel closer. And it really does magnify the joy. There's a great aphorism from Mark Twain from Putinhead Wilson where he says to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. And that's crucial to do in a relationship. It almost seems that today the idea of penalizing or punishing someone for something they've done wrong or they've not performed well. That penalizing them for it is almost archaic and that the enlightened approach in some circles is to praise the positive and ignore the negative when what you're clearly saying is to just praise the positive is a fairly weak way to motivate people's behavior or performance.

20:03But penalizing does work. I mean there's no it works with you know with workers and there've been experiments with teachers who either get bonuses if their kids do well where they get paid dock from them if the kids don't do well. And you know the threat of the threat of that penalty is enough to really motivate the teachers to do better. And students are the same way. So I think again we don't want to go back to corporal punishment but we do think there should be some some kind of penalty mixed with rewards. I know you talk about the power of getting other people's view on what's wrong with your life because just as we can see more objectively other people's problems other people can see more objectively what's going on in our lives because we're just too close to it. In the part that we have the story of from a novel by Anthony Troll about this marriage is felt part for absolutely no reason. You know the husband and wife nothing bad happened really but they both just kept antagonizing the other one and it just built up and built up.

21:10And you know early in the novel when the wife is upset about something the husband said her sister you know offers the best piece of advice in the novel as we say it's if I were you I would forget it. And that's since relying on someone else to make a judgment for you going to them because they don't feel personally threatened they don't feel personally offended by it and there are interesting experiments when they ask people to gamble laboratories that when they ask someone when they ask you to decide how I should bet you will make much more rational decisions than I will because you're not personally involved in that you don't personally feel that sense of loss and so you can be much more. You can be much more rational about it football coaches are just incredibly irrational we see this every Sunday where they keep punning on for them when all the all the statisticians tell them you should go for it that it's you know that you'll score a lot more points in the long run if you go for it on fourth and short almost anywhere on the field you know beyond your own 10 or 20 yard line it really makes sense to go for it and yet the coaches are so afraid of that failure what if we don't make it it'll be on the highlights real.

22:20People blame me for the loss and they just keep punting instead of it and we tell the story of one high school football coach in Arkansas who he trained himself to overcome that negativity bias by I'm gonna I'm not gonna go with my gut I'm gonna pay attention to the statistics and the way I'm gonna avoid you know being. Swade by my emotions in the moment is I'm gonna make a rule beforehand these are the only situations in which I will punt otherwise I automatically go for it and his team punch once a season and they have won the state championship year after you you know they score 50 points of game they always go for it even if you're on one yard line he goes for it isn't that interesting when when the statistics the facts fly in the face of. Punting on fourth down and yet everybody doesn't. And it's amazing I mean once the games on television and the commentators of the worst of all they're oh my god he's going for it you know for fourth and one on you know on the 50 yard line I mean it's ridiculous to put in that you know you're gonna gain maybe 30 or 40 yard but you're giving up the chance to score and that is so much more valuable.

23:33This negativity bias the negativity effect where we tend to notice more the negative things in our life. It seems to not only apply to individual lives but also in a broader sense in that people seem to think that the world is getting worse and yet objectively from what I read that things are actually getting better in almost every area of life. The better life gets you know the more I said you a silly we look for bad things and you know there's an old saying no food one problem much food many problems we suddenly invent these first world problems and you know it's it's it's very sad to me because virtually every measure of human well being. Is improving around the world it's amazing how much better off we are than our ancestors were luckiest people in history where we live longer we're healthier we're wealthier we're better educated and yet when you ask people how things are going are things going to keep getting better.

24:41If you go to developing countries where they can see this progress right away they they're optimistic but in rich countries like the United States and in Europe people are more pessimistic because they they're so swayed by this negativity effect by seeing bad news all the time that they don't realize how much better life is getting for everyone. Well it would seem that just being aware of this being aware of the tendency to focus on the negative can really help you shake loose of it because you're on guard for it. I try to not read all the news because I know I know how much my fellow journalist hyped things and I look for you know the big question I asked when you hear about some new awful trend is well about some new awful problem is what's the trend I mean there's always going to be problems in the world there always be some people who are doing worse in some ways but what is the what's the long range trend or things getting better or worse in this case and which you find over and over again is that over the long haul things are getting better there

25:47sometimes some people suffer but on the whole things are getting better and we solve these problems you know when something comes along we we come up with a solution that typically ends up leaving us better off in the long run. When the dust settles from all of this what's the takeaway what's the message here. We want people to realize that there is much more good in the world than bad and that and and that we there's much more to celebrate than the more and again we want to know how to exploit the power of bad when it's useful and it's a great way to learn you learn more from failure than from success and instead of being you know devastated by a set back we want people to learn how to look for the lessons from it but above all we want people you know to overcome the negativity effect to see that how much is going to write in the world and how much can be going to write in their lives and and and to see and to be optimistic about the future things really are getting better.

26:49Well it's a good message people would remember it better if it was a bad message but I'm glad it's a good message john tyranny has been my guest he and his co author Roy Boundmeister have written a book called the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it and you'll find a link to that book at amazon in the show notes thanks john. Thank you very much Mike and that's it for today's sysk trending episode i'm my carothers thanks for listening to something you should know.