Negativity Bias: What It Is And How It Influences Our Thinking
How many of us have it happened that it has mattered more to us that someone has said something bad to us than that they have said something good to us?
Human beings give more importance to what we see as negative over what we consider positive or neutral. This phenomenon is what has been called negativity bias and it is a concept that we will look at in more detail below.
Negativity bias, or negativity effect, is the tendency to give greater importance to negative aspects of a certain event, person or situation. It is the fact of giving more relevance to negative stimuli over those that may be positive or neutral. This psychological phenomenon has also been called positivity-negativity asymmetry and has a very significant impact on our daily lives.
For example, this phenomenon is what allows us to understand why people, when we meet someone new and learn about a negative trait about them, seem to focus exclusively on their bad characteristics. This would generate a negative first impression, which could hardly be modified in the long term.
It also explains why people We tend to remember more those experiences in which some type of traumatic event has occurred or that we did not like, above those that have been pleasurable to us. We think about insults more than praise, we react more strongly to negative stimuli than positive ones and we tend to think, more frequently, about the bad things rather than the good things that have happened to us.
Elements that make up the phenomenon
When trying to explain the negativity bias, Researchers Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman proposed the existence of four elements that compose it which allow us to understand in more detail and depth how this asymmetry between the positive and the negative occurs.
1. Negative power
Negative power refers to the fact that, when two events have the same intensity and emotionality but are of a different sign, that is, one positive and one negative, they do not have the same degree of salience. The negative event will arouse greater interest than a positive event with the same degree of emotionality and intensity.
Both Rozin and Royzman maintain that this difference in the salience of positive and negative stimuli It is only comparable, empirically, through situations that involve the same degree of intensity. If a positive stimulus has an emotional implication much higher than another stimulus, in this case, negative, it is expected that in this situation the positive stimulus will be better remembered.
2. Negative inequality
When an event, whether positive or negative, approaches in time and space, the degree to which they are perceived as positive or negative is different. A negative event will be perceived as much more negative as it gets closer compared to a positive event.
To better understand this: let’s imagine two situations that involve the same degree of intensity, the beginning of the school year, seen as something negative, and the end of it, seen as something positive. As the start of the course approaches, this event is increasingly perceived as something much more negative than the end of the course, which is perceived as something that is progressively more positive but not as positive.
3. Negative domain
The negative domain refers to the tendency for the combination of both positive and negative aspects results in something more negative than in theory it should be.
That is, the whole is much more negative than the sum of the parts, even if between these parts there is something that is positive.
4. Negative differentiation
Negative differentiation refers to how people We conceptualize the idea of negativity in a much more complex way than the idea of positivity.
This idea is not surprising if we try to make the effort to count how many words are part of our vocabulary and are related to negative aspects. We would get a larger list than if we focused on positive words.
Negativity bias, evolution and biology
An attempt has been made to give an evolutionary and biological explanation to the fact that people give more attention to the negative aspects than to the positive ones. Next we are going to see what the evolutionary and biological bases are behind the negativity bias.
According to neuroscientist Rick Hanson, the negativity bias has an evolutionary nature. According to him, this phenomenon is a consequence of evolution, since early human ancestors learned to make intelligent decisions based on risk that would entail carrying them out. Those humans who remembered negative events better and avoided them had a longer life expectancy than those who took more risks.
This pattern of behavior is what survived, being passed from generation to generation, and this bias is now common in the entire human species, given its great adaptive involvement in the past.
The human brain was shaped to give greater importance to negative aspects, pay more attention to them and take into account potentially dangerous events for the physical, emotional and psychological integrity of the individual.
2. Biological bases
Studies carried out by the American psychologist John Cacioppo showed that the neural processing of negativity bias implies greater activation at the brain level compared to the observation of positive phenomena.
This would be the biological explanation that would support why human beings pay more attention to the negative rather than the positive, going hand in hand with the evolutionary explanation of the previous point.
What was seen in the investigation
Below we will see in detail some of the aspects observed about the negativity bias and its relationship with social and cognitive processes.
1. Impression formation
As we have already seen, negativity bias has a significant influence on forming first impressions of a person we have just met, something that has considerable social implications.
According to the aforementioned, Negative information about a person exerts greater weight when developing a general outline of that person that is, an impression, that of those positive data that have been made known to us about that person.
Although positive and neutral aspects are known, the negative ones end up prevailing, influencing the formation of the impression, something that is perfectly understandable if one of the elements of this bias is taken into account: the negative dominance.
Another explanation given to explain why negativity bias occurs in social contexts is the idea that people believe that negative data about someone They help us establish a reliable diagnosis about your personality.
Negative information is supposed to be more reliable than positive data, which may have been exaggerated or seen as a result of chance.
This often explains the voting intention. Many voters tend to give more importance to the bad things a candidate has done and avoid voting for them instead of giving importance to information about the desired candidate that they find positive.
2. Cognition and attention
Negative information seems to imply a greater movement of resources at a cognitive level than positive information in addition to there being greater activity at the cortical level when greater attention is paid to the bad than to the good.
Bad news, someone’s negative traits, traumatic events… all of these aspects act as a kind of magnet on our attention.
People tend to think more about terms that turn out to be negative rather than positive ones, with the extensive vocabulary of negative concepts being an example of this.
3. Learning and memory
Learning and memory are direct consequences of attention. The greater the attention focused on a given event or phenomenon, the more likely it will be learned and maintained in memory.
An example of this, although controversial, is the way in which punishment exerts a greater weight on memory than reward.
When someone is punished for having done something wrong, they are more likely to avoid doing the behavior that caused them harm, while when they are rewarded for having done something right, they are more likely to forget about it in the long run. .
Yes ok This should not motivate parents to punish their children more frequently Whatever the case, it is interesting to see how the processing of negative events, in this case punishment, seems to have a significant impact on children’s education.
4. Decision making
Studies on negativity bias have also focused on how it influences decision-making ability, especially in situations where risk is avoided or loss is feared.
When a situation arises in which the person can either gain something or lose it, potential costs, something negative, seem to be more important than possible gains.
This consideration of possible losses and avoiding them goes hand in hand with the concept of negative power proposed by Rozin and Royzman.
