Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - How the Negativity Effect Rules Us

Starting point is 00:00:00 When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Suppose 10 people tell you how great you look today, and one person says, You look tired.

Starting point is 00:00:34 Which comment are you going to remember tonight? Probably the bad one. There'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

Starting point is 00:00:52 from your relationships and career to what you buy, what you worry about, and how you see the world. That's why today's S-Y-S-K 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

Starting point is 00:01:19 from running your life. And we'll be back with that insight right after this. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call Someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that.

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Starting point is 00:02:28 So maybe it's time to stop waiting for someday. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees, so you keep everything you earn. 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

Starting point is 00:03:12 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. Hi, 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

Starting point is 00:03:55 criticism instead of enjoying the praise. You know, when you walk into a room and you see bunch of faces, you focus on the hostile one and you miss all the smiles. And, you know, and this negativity effect, it just skews the way we see the world. It skews our decisions and our relationship. 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 take particular notice of? And the ones you can't forget. get. It's just the same things happened as, 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, the one, you know, cranky guy who posts a review, who you think never really actually read the book.

Starting point is 00:04:43 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 evolutionary 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 than it was to savor the good things. You know, you really had to pay attention not to eat poisonous 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, whereas 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.

Starting point is 00:05:36 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. But the problem, as 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. And they know the easiest way to get our attention, whether on television,

Starting point is 00:06:03 on, you know, 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 the old saying that if it bleeds, it leads, because people are drawn to the violent, to the bloody, 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 summer intern, and I found myself ridiculously hyping this weather story to make it sound like Armageddon. And I just wonder, why am I doing this and why do readers want to see all this bad news?

Starting point is 00:06:41 And the answer for mass media is that it's just the easiest way to get attention. The good news today is that, you know, podcasts like yours are, you know, 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:07:18 it gives people a chance to listen for an extended time to something that really interests, you know, some positive thing that interests them. So knowing that this is very pervasive, it's basically human nature, 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 a useful lesson. You know, the upside of the negativity effect is its power to teach and demotivate. 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.

Starting point is 00:08:07 You know, taking the marble away, the penalty, they learn much faster that way. Religions that emphasize hell tend to grow much more quickly. They fill the pews on Sunday 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. It's 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.

Starting point is 00:08:41 So, you know, the average grade at 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. I 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, from the 1970s and 80s, which is one of the sorrier mistakes in the history of psychology.

Starting point is 00:09:22 In fact, my co-author Roy Baummeister, Rina, who is one of the leading social psychologists, he started his career in that self-esteem research and thought it looked very promising because people saw that kids with high self-esteem, you know, do well, and they thought that's what caused it. When fact where Roy and others found out was that, 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. So that's one of the reasons.

Starting point is 00:09:53 The other reason, and this whole idea that the carrot is more effective than the stick, we traced the history of that cliche. 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 this 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 in the winter circle of the Kentucky Derby,

Starting point is 00:10:23 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

Starting point is 00:10:51 because the criticism is really where people learn. One 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:33 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. 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, then you slip in a little criticism and then you say a few nice things and that's it. The 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 and and it and so the person walks out of the meeting all they can think of is the bad

Starting point is 00:12:13 stuff and they've forgotten all the good stuff so our advice is to get the criticism done early because and then the brain's on high alert and then you say the praise and you know and try to say more than you know four bits of praise for every bit of criticism and and you know and give the criticism and and you can do it in a positive way saying you know this didn't work last year but here's a way that we're going to you know deal with the next year and things are going to be better than ever. You know, so you don't want the person walking out demoralize, but you've got to make sure that they hear what's gone wrong so they can improve.

Starting point is 00:12:46 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. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out.

Starting point is 00:13:18 Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. So, John, well, one of the things, in fact, I just recently spoke with someone about relationships and they said, Well, 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

Starting point is 00:13:51 bad ones because 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. But in general, in relationships, it's great.

Starting point is 00:14:18 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 or which ones don't, they find that it depends mainly on how spouses

Starting point is 00:14:54 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, that they really, you know, and 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. They'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. They've been out realistically high. And it works for both of you. So, I mean, it is really important to avoid needs to need.

Starting point is 00:15:35 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 selfish or that they were trying to hurt you. 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 researcher uses 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 a study this research, I try to do it, you know, every day, is that when someone, when you have good news, share it with someone because sharing it makes it much more powerful.

Starting point is 00:16:19 And when you hear someone's good news, don't just sit there quietly nodding. You know, you should do something like, say, that's great, ask some questions about it, talk about it. It makes it try it more significant. it makes both of you feel better, makes you feel closer. And it really does magnify the joy. You know, there's a great aphorism from Mark Twain from Pudinhead 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.

Starting point is 00:16:53 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. Penalizing does work. I mean, there's no, It works with workers, and there have been experiments with teachers who either get bonuses if their kids do well or they get paid docked from them if the kids don't do well. And, you know, the threat of that penalty is enough to really motivate the teachers to do better.

Starting point is 00:17:45 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 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. I mean, the power of bad, we have the story from a novel by Anthony Trollope about this marriage that fell apart 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. And, 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.

Starting point is 00:18:45 And in that sense, relying on someone else to make a judgment for you, going to them, because they don't feel personally threatened. and they don't feel personally affronted by it. And there are interesting experiments when they ask people to gamble in laboratories that 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 rational about it. Football coaches are just incredibly irrational.

Starting point is 00:19:19 We see this every Sunday where they keep punning on fourth down when all the odds, 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. People will 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, he, he trained himself to overcome that negativity bias by he said, I'm going to, I'm not going to go with my gut.

Starting point is 00:19:59 I'm going to pay attention to the statistics. And the way I'm going to avoid, you know, being swayed by my emotions in the moment is I'm going to make a rule beforehand. These are the only situations in which I will punt. And otherwise, I automatically go for it. And his team punts once a season. And they have won the state championship year after year. You know, they score 50 points a game. they always go forward, even if he's on his own one-yard line, he goes for it. Isn't that interesting when the statistics, the facts fly in the face of punting on fourth down, and yet everybody does it? And it's amazing.

Starting point is 00:20:37 I mean, you watch the games on television, and the commentators are the worst of all. They're, oh, my God, he's going for it, you know, on fourth and one, you know, on the 50-yard line. I mean, it's ridiculous to punt in that situation. You know, you're going to gain maybe 30 or 40 yards, but you're giving him. up the chance to score, and that is so much more valuable. This negativity bias, the negativity effect where we tend to notice more the negative things in our life, 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,

Starting point is 00:21:18 from what I've read, that things are actually getting better in almost every single. area of life. The better life gets, you know, the more assiduously 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 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.

Starting point is 00:21:51 We're the luckiest people in history. 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? If you go to developing countries where they can see this progress right away, they're optimistic. But in rich countries like the United States and in Europe, people are more pessimistic because they're so swayed by this negativity effect by seeing bad news all the time that they don't realize.

Starting point is 00:22:21 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 so much because I know how much of my fellow journalist hype things. And I look for, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:45 the big question I ask when you hear about some new awful trend is, or about some new awful problem is what's the trend? I mean, there's always going to be problems in the world. There will always be some people who are doing worse in some ways. But what is the, what's the long-range trend, are things getting better or worse in this case? And what you find over and over again is that over the long haul, things are getting better. There are blips sometimes and some people suffer. But on the whole, things are getting better.

Starting point is 00:23:14 And we solve these problems. You know, when something comes along, we come up with a solution. and 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 there's much more to celebrate than to mourn. And again, we want people to know how to exploit the power of bad when it's useful. It's a great way to learn. You learn more from failure than from success.

Starting point is 00:23:47 And instead of being devastated by a setback, we want people to learn how to look for the lessons from it. But above all, we want people to overcome the negativity effect, to see how much is going right in the world and how much can be going right in their lives and to see and to be optimistic about the future. Things really are getting better. Well, 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 Tierney has been my guest. He and his co-author Roy Baumeister 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

Starting point is 00:24:37 today's S-Y-S-K trending episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.

Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - How the Negativity Effect Rules Us

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