The Jordan Harbinger Show - 312: John Tierney | Harnessing the Power of Bad

Episode Date: February 13, 2020

John Tierney (@johntierneynyc) is an award-winning science columnist for The New York Times, and he's the co-author of The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. [Featured photo by Jamie Meggas] What We Discuss with John Tierney: What is negativity bias, and why does even a small dose of it have the power to overwhelm even our greatest reserves of positivity? How can we psychologically overcome this innate negativity bias? How we can watch the news (especially during an election year) without succumbing to deep despair at the state of the world by consuming what John calls a low-bad diet. Why the worst person at your workplace has the power to passively drag the whole team down beyond the abilities of the best person to bring it up. The negative golden rule -- it's what you do not do unto others that really matters. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/312 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Start your free trial today. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DePhilippe. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most brilliant and interesting people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave, expose you to some of the latest research and technology, and we want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, public speaking, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, then you'll be right at home here with us.

It's strange when you think about it. We might get 10 compliments on something, but just one negative review or comment. And yet that's what we focus on. We remember all the crappy things our boss has said to us over the past 10 years, but we forget that on most days, he's a lot. nothing but encouraging. Why do we do this to ourselves? Well, it's called the negativity bias, and we've evolved that way to keep out of danger and stay alive. But is the negativity bias just a relic of our cave human past? Does it still serve a purpose? How can we harness it and get it going in our favor? In today's conversation, science writer John Tierney explains not only why we have

this bias, but how it's been weaponized against us by media and news outlets and what we can do to reverse and even win the Battle of the Bad. If you want to know how I managed to book all these amazing folks, it's about who's in my network. If you don't have your own show, I understand that, but you should have a network for both professional and personal reasons. Highly recommended, it's been life-changing for everybody that puts it together here. Six-minute networking is our free course on networking, not enter your credit card free, but free free. That's over at jordanherbanger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in great company. Here we go with John Tierney.

You know, there's a lot of books now, and I'm sure you've noticed this, they're like, it's a science book, it's full of research, but it's really like a life coach writing about their anecdotal evidence from their five clients that they have so that they can write a book that they can get, you know, 50 clients. It's not science. It's not actual science. Or their lab is their apartment where they have a virtual assistant doing spreadsheets and it's like, I'm running a lab experiment. I have a three. Five of my closest friends running this experiment. It's completely scientific. Right.

Or one study that they read about, you know, online somewhere and throw that into it is a little ballast, yeah. The abstract says this. So I'm just going to assume that supports this conclusion that I thought of on the subway this morning and throw it into the book chapter. Yeah. There's a lot of that. You've been writing about science, like real science, for a while. And this topic is pretty interesting. Negativity bias is something I think a lot of people don't realize exists.

And I think that's what makes it probably the most problematic. What do you think? People are just not aware of. I mean, social scientists didn't know about it until fairly recently. It was a strange thing where they knew about a few things. You know, back in the 80s, economists documented they did experiments about loss aversion, and they found that people care a lot more about losing money than they do about making money. And you had to offer them kind of twice as much money to make up for a loss. They realized that people valued losses more than gains. And then there were some studies, too, showing that first impressions, a bad first impression

is a lot stronger than a good first impression. So there were these isolated findings. But my co-author, Roy Baummeister, who's just a great social psychologist. He's written in so many different areas. He's one of the most quoted social psychologists in the world. He got kind of intrigued by those two little things. And then he started looking around. They decided, let's do a paper and see when good things are stronger and find out when bad

things are stronger. We'll try and figure out why that happens and notice a pattern. And what he discovered, they looked all through the literature and psychology and sociology and economics of various fields. And they just could not find examples of good being stronger than bad. A bad emotion or a bad event had much more power than a good emotion or a good event. And so that's the negativity bias or the negativity effect. We realize it intuitively to some extent, people know that if someone gives you a lot of compliments and one bit of criticism, you go home obsessing about the criticism and you forget the compliments. But people don't realize, and social scientists didn't know it either, just how widespread

this is, that it just extends across all domains. What are some kind of common examples of the negativity bias in action? One is news and we'll go up against that in a little bit. Is there anything sort of in our day-to-day life that's not just, I remember all the bad things that happened in the news? I mean, can we think of a few that we maybe encounter every day? Because I'm imagining the listener at home, we're in their car going, I don't know if I do that. And it's like, well, yeah, you do.

You read Yelp or whatever, right? I mean, when people are shopping online and they're looking at reviews, we have a chapter on online negativity, they're much more influenced by the bad reviews. You know, a lot of people go straight there. And even if they don't, you know, they're reading them and that one bad review just has so much more impact than a good review, even when it may not be a particularly intelligent review. In reading comments to your own post, if you're seeing people comment, you know, that one negative comment will just stick with you in a way. that the good ones don't. I mean, there have been a lot of experiments showing things that when you walk into a room and you see a bunch of faces, you naturally focus first on the face with a hostile expression, and you miss all the friendly smiles. I mean, our brain is just wired to pay attention

to bad things first. And, you know, there's a good reason. I mean, it helped our ancestors survive. It's adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint. You've got to stay alert to threats because, you know, life has to win every day. Death only has to win once. So it's important to pay attention. of that. What we don't realize is how we're just surrounded in such a high, bad environment today. I mean, you turn on the news, you look at social media. It's people sniping at each other. It's people trying to sell you things, telling you that there's something wrong with you. The easiest way to get your attention is with something negative, that, you know, something's going wrong, you're in danger, there's a risk, you've done something wrong. That's the easiest way to

get your attention. And there are all these folks out there trying to do that all day long. the merchants of bad, as we call them. That's a little scary because it probably reinforces, does it reinforce the negativity bias or does it just work in concert with the negativity bias? For example, if the headline is three reasons you might be getting the coronavirus this week or something like that, which if you're listening to this in like three years, that's the latest sort of viral scare out of China. Yes. And is very timely right now. I was literally going on right now. And so people would maybe go, oh, my gosh, I don't want to get the coronavirus. I better read all about this. I've got a friend who's coming back from a vacation in China. Maybe they have

it, even though they're 3,000 miles away on the other side of the country. Does it play in context with the negativity bias, or do we get more negative because we're seeing more negative things? Does that question make sense? It's a little convoluted. Yes, it does. And you've actually hit on point the researchers of study, this cascading effect where it feeds on itself. Folks who are We're scaring you. And as a journalist, I'm in the first group that's guilty of this. You know, journalists are always trying to scare a mass audience with. Here's some awful news. There's a new virus in China that's going to kill you. There's, you know, there's a hurricane coming. There's whatever. We love to scare people. Researchers talk about the availability bias, which is that

we're scared of things when a readily available image of it comes to mind. So a terrorist attack, we can visualize them very easily because we see them on the news all the time. You know, we've seen the endless things of 9-11. So stuff that we've heard about a lot and seen images of, it's, you know, that's available in our mind. So it's very easy, you know, once you've been exposed to those scares, it's very easy to just trigger that once again. So once this virus gets in the news and suddenly you're very sensitive to it. And then the more scared people get, the more coverage there is because, you know, the journalists know, God, people are really interested in this. They're really afraid of this. Now, only a few people have gotten this virus so far. If you have to

pass as any guide, they're always known. new viruses and they can be dangerous, but in general, you know, there was the Ebola virus and, you know, in a series of other ones that were all predicted to be this unstoppable disaster. And, you know, some people are hit by them, but most people are not. And the good news overall that you don't hear in all these stories is that our capabilities of dealing with these threats are so much vaster than they used to be. I mean, think polio was around for, you know, thousands of years before a vaccine was developed. Since then, AIDS was a real scourge. But, you know, within a couple decades, that was brought under control.

And now with genetic techniques, you know, we can build tools against these viruses, you know, more quickly than ever. So, yes, there will always be problems. And this virus is a genuine problem for some people. But, you know, it's not going to be something that's wiping out humanity, which is the kind of specter that we're always getting the killer virus that sweeps across and causes a new black plague. That is always good to hear. Of course, we do know there are superbugs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And we know that I did a show about this with Dr. Matt McCarthy. Unfortunately, that is also used by, well, journalists like you, to scare the crap out of us.

Like, you're going to get Merzer or whatever it's called it, that strain of staff that is in hospitals that kills a lot of patients. And it's like, well, this is a different type of thing. Luckily, this particular virus happened in China where they can basically say, hey, no one's allowed to leave this entire city. And we're sending in the army, whereas here that would be a huge, I mean, we'd be. litigating that for 17 years in the Supreme Court. Right. That's right. No, I mean, there are always going to be problems. I mean, you know, there's billions of people living and there are natural problems. There are problems that arise between people. But, you know, emphasizing the power of bad is not to let the negativity overwhelm you

and that when you stop and look at long-term trends, you know, everything's getting better, basically. You know, the odds of you're being killed by a virus are lower than ever. People used to die routinely in their 50s, you know, their 40s, 50s, half of children before the age of five used to die. You know, there's never been a lower risk of premature death of dying young, death by violence. That's in an all-time low, too. Your odds of being in a war or being killed by other forms of violence are lower than ever. I mean, life has never been better for most people. But there's always going to be problems, and it's good to pay attention to them.

You know, and the great long-term trend is that when these problems come along, we deal with them, and we usually come up with a solution that leads to you. leaves us better off in the long run. We have new tools for dealing with future problems. This is good news, but it seems like my brain won't really want to absorb it or accept it, because I mean, the whole point of your book here, work here is that bad is stronger than good. That's what the negativity bias is. So are we kind of pissing into the wind here by telling people that, hey, your brain is, what's that expression? It's like Teflon for the good and Velcro for the bad. Oh, I hadn't heard. That's good. I remember that. I hadn't heard that.

Yeah. We talk about the rule of four. And this is based on a lot of different studies when they track people's moods during the day, people's interactions that were interactions between spouses who were talking or arguing with each other. And as a general rule of thumb, it takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. So if you're late for one meeting, you're not going to make up for it by being early the next time. And if you say one bit of criticism to someone or something hurtful to someone, you don't make it up by saying one nice thing. Our point is that you can't rewerewere wire your brain, your brain's always going to be wired to pay attention to that. And some of the stuff is just automatic. I mean, you know, what kind of face you focus on in the room, this stuff. But you can train it. We discuss in the par bad, for instance, how there are new treatments, including some using smartphones that for people who suffer from crippling social anxiety, they're so nervous to go into a room. And part of the problem is that they look at the faces and they interpret everything negatively. They fixate on the people who look hostile instead of the welcoming ones. And they have these exercises to try and train them to start looking for smiles instead of frowns and basically

to, you know, try and use their rational brain to overcome that visceral impulse. And that's really, I mean, that's how civilization advances is we overcome our gut instincts when they're misleading us. And in this book, I mean, our goal in writing the book was to teach people how to use the power of bad when it is useful and it can be really useful, but also how to overcome it when it's not, how to use your cerebral cortex, that rational part of you, how to overcome it. I mean, all animals have this negativity effect. All animals instantly respond much more quickly to bad things and threats than to good things. But humans have this unique ability to override that. The fear of falling is innate. You know, infants are afraid of this before they can, you know, talk or walk.

They're afraid of falling off things. But people can override that and become, you know, devotees of skydiving and bungee jumping. You can train your mind. to overcome these gut feelings. Now, let's talk about how negativity can actually be useful. This was, I'm married to a Taiwanese gal named Jen, and her parents are always, they're very Asian. And what I mean by that is they're like, you have to work really hard and you have to do this and you have to do this.

And I was talking to Jen because I hear this a lot. And I'm like, wow, were you raised like this? And she said, yeah, you know, Asian parents are kind of notoriously pretty tough on us, especially with school and things like that. And I thought, well, now people don't do that. And then I read your book and it's like, oh, that kind of works. You know, this whole criticism penalties can really bring out the best in people. And I thought, oh, my gosh, that just flies in the face of all these parenting books I just read that were written, you know, in the last 10 years.

Right. Well, you know, I mean, it's not a coincidence, I think, that Asian students do so well in school. The previous book that I did with where I'm by Monster willpower, we, you know, talked about self-control. and you look at how children are raised, you know, and some of the studies, I mean, it's hard to do a real cross-national, but the way Asian children are raised, they tend to have better self-control, they're just at school and things. And, you know, much of that is due to the fact, you know, that there are consequences for failure. One of the sorriest mistakes in psychology was the self-esteem movement in the 1970s and 80s. And the idea was that if you can just boost people's self-esteem, they'll do better.

and it turned out that the researchers just had it backwards. Yes, successful people have good self-esteem, but it's not the self-esteem that leads to success. It's the success that gives you self-esteem. But because of that movement, I mean, it's really been debunked by researchers, the idea that raising kids' self-esteem is the key to helping them flourish. It's been debunked by researchers, but it's still become this reigning philosophy in schools and among parents.

So parents and teachers, they're afraid to criticize children, they're afraid to penalize them. Kids have grown up now for the last couple decades with us, everybody gets a trophy. We don't have, you know, nobody fails. A lot of schools eliminated failing grades. Some of them eliminated grades altogether. We don't have class rank in high school anymore. The average grade has gone up both in high school and in college.

The average grade in college is an A-minus now. And, you know, teachers, and in most, you know, especially in the public schools, teachers don't get fired when they do a bad job of teaching. So nobody's paying penalties. And we understand, you know, why it's more pleasant to give rewards than it is to penalize people. But the research is pretty clear that penalties are more effective than rewards. I mean, you want to have a mix. I mean, you want to give someone praise and criticism.

The praise tells them what they're doing right and the criticism tells them what they're doing wrong. But what you really learned from the most is the criticism and of necessary a penalty, because that really forces you to focus on what needs to be improved. And so we think that children would learn more. You know, workers also do a better job when the penalties work better than bonuses, generally with workers, with teachers, with other things. So the power of bad is really useful in that sense, that it really brings out the best in people. And there's really too much fear of the consequences of penalties or the consequences of bad events.

I mean, this is part of the negativity effect, too, I think, you know, that we overreact to this and think that it's going to be fatal. all of us have heard about PTSD, which has been studied to death. And there's this common idea that if you undergo a trauma, that it'll scar you permanently and that it really, there's nothing you can only do about that. Now, it is true that some people do suffer from PTSD. You know, they are affected by trauma for a long time. But it's not the norm at all. The majority of people who undergo trauma ultimately emerge stronger. It's called post-traumatic growth. And they say, that this event really made me stronger in the long run. It made me more capable, more tolerant. So we want people to know that. That just because something bad happens to you, it doesn't mean that

you'll be scarred for life. This can actually make you a stronger person, the same way that, you know, doing bad land a test and getting a bad grade forces you to improve. This is interesting for me, because, of course, counterintuitive flies in the face of everything we've learned, supposedly learned, in air quotes, about education and parenting and me with a new, a baby. I'm thinking about all this stuff, it's interesting to see and to hear that we need to penalize the kids or they won't learn or they won't be motivated. Same with workers. And it does make sense. So this whole, they'll never learn about the real world. Well, that's also true, but mostly they won't actually even do the real work in school, which is just as bad, because that's what they're dealing with right then.

Also, an interesting point that you made in the book, rewards have to be doled out continually, but just the threat of a penalty is actually as effective. So you can't offer a reward and receive a benefit from that. You actually have to give the reward. But if you threaten a penalty, you don't actually have to give the penalty. The threat actually is motivating enough. That's big. That's kind of a big deal.

Right. It's something that social scientists have discovered rather belatedly, although, you know, some people, preachers have known about this forever. And so have some managers. We tell the story in the book about this factory that was making potato chips where the workers, there was this terrible morale and workers were getting fired. And workers started writing obscenities on the potato chips. And people would open up their back of potato chips and there'd be this FU on it.

And so they sent in someone to try and deal with this. And what he learned was that they had been doing these penalties, but it was really just being done badly where they would let things go on too long and by the time they actually brought in somebody for disciplinary action, the manager just wanted to fire him, and the worker felt he's being treated unfairly. So they brought in the system where they would start warning people earlier, and they wouldn't penalize them at first,

but they would give them this warning and say, if it happened a couple of times, they would have them go home for a day. And so we want you to really think about this, because we'd like you to stay here. But if this isn't the place for you, just tell us and you can leave. But if this problem happens again, we're going to fire you. So they didn't actually dock him his pay.

they didn't suspend them. They just forced them to think about it and held that penalty in front of them, that that was the ultimate penalty. And it worked. I mean, they basically, the morale improved. They had to fire very few people, and the workers did shape up. I mean, the other example we talk about in the book that I find fascinating is the history of Christianity in the United States, that if you go back to colonial times, you find, and this pattern just keeps recurring, where the mainstream churches, it was congregationalism and Episcop. opalianism in the colonial days, their clergy started kind of getting softer. They downplayed the message of penalties of hell. And it was, they preached a more benevolent God and they de-emphasized

the threat of eternal damnation. And what happened was people stopped going to church. And then, you know, starting in the 18th century, the Methodist came along with these hell-fearing preachers. And they became the overwhelming dominant religion in the United States. And then the Methodist eased up. They got more benevolent. And so was hell-fearing Baptists and Catholics who became the biggest churches in the U.S. And then some of them softened their message. So recently it's been Pentecostals and evangelicals who've been growing instead. And that's the idea that you talked about, that the penalty doesn't have to be administered immediately. The threat of hell, that's not an immediate penalty. That's a really long-range one. But the threat of that penalty in the future causes people to

at least go to church on Sunday. And there's some interesting research when they look around the world at different countries, the belief in heaven and hell varies. How many people believe in heaven, how many people believe in hell? And they found that the countries where more people believe in hell have lower crime rates. That's interesting. It seems to deter people, you know, that it is that threat of punishment. You know, and it goes back to these experiments in the lab, too, where one of my favorite ones was when it was these young children, they were giving them marbles for getting correct answers, but some of the children would receive a marble for every correct answer they gave. The other children would start out with a jar full of marbles, and they

would have a marble taken away when they got a wrong answer. And it was designed so that at the end, the typical kids would have the same number, whether you started with a full jar or nothing, you'd end up with, you know, you maybe have to jar full. Well, the kids who had the marbles taken away, who were penalized for failure, learned much faster than the other kids, and they ended up with more marbles as a result. So that sort of proves that that method of teaching, for example, is better. I want to go back to the countries that have

lower homicide rates are the ones that believe more strongly in the concept of heaven or hell. Is that causal or is it just a correlation? Have they developed a causal relationship to that? It seems like it would be hard to establish that. Because of course, you could also say, yeah, you know what they also have, a police state or something like that, you know what I mean?

No, it's definitely just a correlation. I mean, you can't do a controlled study. What's impressive about it, is that this is based on surveys that have been done around the world. I think it's hundreds of thousands of people have taken it. So it's not like a small group of college students and they get a little correlation in a lab experiment. This is, you know, it's very big data that they've done this in.

And you can't prove that it's causation, but it's very suggestive. And, you know, one version of an experiment, one of the researchers who has studied this, tried to test it in the lab where he had some students come in and they had to do this task on a computer. And they were warned that there was a glitch in the computer that made it possible to cheat. But please don't exploit the glitch. We're trying to fix it.

So, of course, he watched to see which ones cheat. That was the whole point of the experiment. And he'd asked the students ahead of time to talk about their religious beliefs. And there were various questions about how they conceived God. Did they conceive God as more this benevolent, very kind deity? or did they see him as more of a punishing deity, a stern deity, who would punish you for your sins? And when he looked at who cheated and who didn't, he found it didn't make that much difference, you know, if you were male or female, didn't make that much difference as you were very

religious or not religious. But what did make a difference was how you thought of God. And that if you thought of God as this more punishing figure, you know, rather than the sort of very nice benevolent deity, if you thought of God as this punishing figure, then you were much less likely to cheat on the exam. So that was, you know, a correlation too, although it does suggest, you know, some causation. It suggests an explanation for that data we see in all those countries. Was this done in Muslim countries as well? I'm so curious, because it seems like a very, hell is kind of a very Christian concept, but an angry God is kind of a universal concept for religions in many ways. Well, yeah, no, I mean, Islam is a very fast-growing religion, and they, you know,

they do have a concept of hell. So, you know, religions that believe in hell tend to spread and grow much more quickly than ones that don't. So I believe I don't have the data in front of me, but it's a huge international survey. And I think it was dozens and dozens of countries, you know, maybe more than 100 countries. So I would imagine that it had Muslim countries. I know it had, I think, Africa and Latin America and I think probably Asia, too. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, John Tierney. We'll be right back.

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It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with John Tierney. I do find this to be interesting. And of course, it's one of the reasons that you have theocratic countries in the first place. They say, look, this place is safer, you know, because everybody believes the same thing, namely that if you do something bad, you're going to be struck down by a higher power. Sometimes that higher power is just the religious police in the case like Saudi Arabia or some of these other countries. But it seems to be working. in some way. Now, that's not to say it's a great place to live as a result. I just want to be clear here.

Going back to criticism at work and things like this, the negativity at work, you did discuss the criticism sandwich and why this is actually worse than mere criticism itself, worse than no praise at all as well. So can we talk about this? This is a very common sort of management 101 technique. It turns out to be baloney. Criticism is a great way to get people to improve, but most people, you don't know how to give it properly, you know, including people who give bad news all the time, like doctors. And in the book, we write about how, you know, they've studied how doctors give bad news and also how managers do evaluations. And there was this classic technique from the 70s and 80s called the criticism sandwich. And the idea is that you start off with,

you know, a lot of nice praise for the employee and tell him what he's done right. Then you slip in some criticism, then you had a little more praise on at the end, and that's it. And it feels good to the manager to do that because most of us, when they ask people, if you have to criticize someone, And if you have to give them good news and bad news, you know, which would you rather do first? And people say, I'd rather give the good news first. It's a lot more pleasant way to start a conversation. But when you ask people how they'd like to receive a mix of news, people say, I'd rather get the bad news first.

And that also turns out to be the best way for them to get the whole picture. Because what happens, when you'd give someone a bunch of good news and say you've been doing this right, this right, and that right, but here's where you fell short. As soon as that criticism hits, because of the negativity effect, it's so powerful, it just completely engages your brain. And you tend to forget everything that happened before that. I mean, another example is when something really bad happens like your computer crashes, you know, tech people say that, you know, someone calls up in a panic, my computer crash. What can I do? And they'll say, well, what were you doing before it crashed?

And people can't remember. Because that bad events just jolted their brain so much, and they just actually lost the memory of the good stuff before because the brain was so distracted. by this. So, you know, the manager gives out this praise and then a bit of criticism and then a little bit of praise and then he thinks that he's done his job and the worker should feel good because mostly what he gave was praise. But all the worker can remember, he's forgotten all the praise that came. He just remembers that criticism. So it's better in general to get the criticism out of the way early. I mean, you might want to start the session by saying, you know, you've done a good job this year and we're looking forward to next year so the, you know, worker knows he's not

about to be fired. Yeah. But in general, you want to get to the criticism first because then, and then once they hear that, then the brain is on high alert, and then it'll actually take in the praise. You know, then you say, okay, you did that wrong, but you did these other things great, and here's how we're going to build on your strengths to make next year even better. You know, so you're basically pointing out what's wrong, and that's certainly going to stay with them, but you're also throwing in all the good things. And in general, you know, try to remember that rule of four, as we call it, that it takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. So don't be afraid of overpraising people. In fact, in the

book we talk about there's some kind of funny experiments where they show that you can never overpraise people. These things where even the most insincere kind of flattery works. So if you've got to give some bad news, you know, throwing lots of good news with it too. But after you've gotten the bad out of the way. We'll throw this formula in the worksheets for this episode so people don't have to rewind and go, wait, so what's the formula again? What's the formula again? We'll throw it in the worksheet, which are always available in the show notes so that you can stop using the compliment sandwich, which actually makes no sense. It's actually a criticism. sandwich and praise people and criticize them in a way that's actually effective and doesn't just

result in it bouncing around in their brain and then shooting out their other ear. There's another experiment that you detail in the book that I thought was fascinating, this cockroach apple juice experiment, and it kind of details the idea that there's an old saying, a spoonful of tar will dam a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel full of tar. Can you explain that and deconstruct that and tell us about what the cockroach apple juice experiment actually shows an illustration of this? I mean, that saying is a great example of the negativity effect.

The bat is just so much stronger than good that one little bit of tar ruins a whole barrel of honey and it doesn't work the other way. I mean, that's an old folk saying that the people have known for a while. But it was demonstrated in some clever experiments where they would show people this glass of apple juice and they would put a sterilized cockroach in it. And people knew it was sterilized. But after they saw that, the people refused to drink apple juice. I mean, they wouldn't drink it from that glass.

It's so revolts them that if they were offered a fresh glass with apple juice poured from a fresh carton, had nothing to do with that cockroach at all, they still would refuse to drink it. Their feeling of disgust was so strong that nothing could overcome it. But imagine for a minute that there's some disgusting food that's on a plate, and then someone offered to put your favorite food, a piece of molten chocolate cake, say, and they would put that on top of the disgusting food. Would that make you willing to eat the disgusting food?

And the answer is no, of course, because it just doesn't work the other way. The negativity effect is enforced. As the researchers put it, there's no anti-cockroats. That a cockroach can ruin a really good food, but there's nothing that can rescue a bad food at all. There's nothing so good that it can overcome your revulsion at it.

And you see this on lots of religious traditions too, where it takes, you know, years of devotion, decades of devotion in order to become a saint or to become holy or to become enlightened. But it can all be undone and, you know, with one bad act, one demon appears and tempts you and you've suddenly damned. So there is this idea that bad is so much stronger than good that it just takes one little bit of it to ruin you, whereas it just doesn't work the other way. There isn't one good thing. And that's, I mean, that's true in so much of life, where one act of infidelity can destroy a marriage. But there isn't any one good thing you can do

that will guarantee that marriage will last forever. And another example is that there's the psychologist who discovered the negativity effect. You know my co-author Roy Baummeister, he noticed that for most things in psychology, when you're describing emotions and events, you're dealing with opposites. You're happy or sad, you're relaxed,

or you're anxious, you're angry, or you're... But he noticed the word trauma. Now, a trauma is a bad thing. event that affects you long afterwards. And he was trying to think, well, what's the opposite of trauma? What's a good event that would, you know, last with you, you know, for decades and keep affecting you? And there is no word that means the opposite of trauma, because there's no good event that has that lasting impact. I mean, you know, one traumatic experience, you know, a sexual experience, some violence. I mean, your youth can stick with some people, you know,

their whole lives. But, you know, no one goes through adulthood, fixated on the that wonderful day at the zoo. It just doesn't, you know, that bad is just stronger that way. Now, again, you know, and we do try to tell people in the book that these things can be overcome and that most people who undergo trauma actually do. It has much more, you know, a bad event has so much more impact at the time. And that's, it has bad effects at the time. And the message of our book is that bad is stronger, but good can prevail, because trauma victims typically respond in so many little positive ways to that event that over the long haul, the good overwhelms the bad, that any one bad event is much stronger, but there's so many more good things that that's how good prevails. It's with intelligence and by force of numbers, that you just do so many good things. You know, that's why the world keeps getting better. There's lots of bad stuff that happens, but on a typical day, there's a lot more than four good things happening for every bad one. That's why life gets better. How is this reflected in our language? You'd mentioned before there's no such thing as the opposite of trauma. In our language, you mentioned this in the book as well. There's no opposite of accident. There's no opposite of murderer or killer. There's no opposites to these words. These things are strongly represented in the way that we speak. So it's kind of coded into the human, I hate overusing this. But it's like coded into our DNA, right? It's coded into our society. Right. Well, I mean, language is a great way to reflect that. And my co-author, where I'm a

look for examples, instead of Paul Rosen, who also worked on this, and they looked for examples of words that have no opposites, you know, the singular nouns they called them. And they found that there were only about a half dozen of them, accident. And, you know, most people couldn't think of a word meaning the opposite of risk, which is, you know, a risk is something that bad will happen. What's the word meaning the chance something good will happen? And an accident is another one. And they found that there were just a handful of these things, and they were all bad things, that there was no opposite for that. So that showed you that, you know, that unique power of bad in those circumstances.

Another linguistic thing that's been noticed, and this is not just in English, it's in languages around the world, that there are a lot more words for bad things than for good things. There are a lot more different words for pain than for pleasure, for instance. And that's because these things are so important as our brain is so conditioned to focus on them that we come up with lots of words to describe, you know, different kinds of pain, different kinds of this. It's so important to us. That may sound a bit grim, but the good news is, and we have a chapter in the book

called the Polyana Principle, which is that people who study the way language is used have also noticed that although there are more individual words for bad things, more ways to, you know, more synonyms for pain, people in the language that we use all day long, we use a lot more positive words than negative words. And that's kind of our brain's mechanism for overcoming the power of bad, that we're accentuating the positive by talking more about it. And I think there's a good social reason for that. I mean, nobody really wants to be around someone who's just negative all the time. It's fairly draining. And you do get social rewards for being positive. So I think that's one reason that we tend to do this. And it's our natural weapon against bad and that, you know,

there are bad things out there. They hit our brains hard. We worry about them, but we fight back partly by using more positive words. Researchers first notices, you know, they would count the number of words in the New York Times and rate them positive or negative. And then, you know, since the advent of big data, they've done these amazing studies where they have just done tens of millions of data sources looking at TV shows, at the internet, at webposts, at newspapers, at books, at music lyrics. And they found consistently in every medium they look at that there are people use more positive words than negative words. And, you know, they track the language on Twitter, for instance, and they can, you know, kind of see what the mood on Twitter is during the day by the ratio of positive to negative

words. And on some awful days, like when there's a terrorist attack, you'll hear a lot more negative words. But even on those days, it's interesting, you know, people will be horrified by when an awful event happens and in the Twitter positivity ratio, goes down. People are sounding much more negative. But then it tends to rebound fairly quickly. You know, something awful happens. There's a mass shooting and people are appalled by it. But then you start hearing the stories of somebody who saved someone's life, someone who, you know, who did something heroic, a first responder who did something great. And people look for ways to counteract that negativity effect. They're trying to use that rational brain to fight against the, you know, the power of bad.

Let's talk about terrorism here for a minute because it does make a little cameo. in the book, strategically terrorism was pointless until mass media actually made it effective. So they're really tapped into the negativity bias. Exactly. The media, the mass media, and I'm guilty as charged as a member of it, we are what I call the merchants of bad. And we're not alone. We cooperate with politicians, with activists, with academics, with various experts. But we know that the easiest way to get a mass audience is with negativity. People, just respond to it instantly. You know, one of my first newspaper jobs, I was a summer intern at a newspaper in Philadelphia,

and I was assigned to write a weather story. It was like the most boring story you can write. There was a heat wave. And I was kind of desperate to write, you know, what do you say about hot weather? And a lot of people in Philadelphia were, you know, go to the Jersey Shore on a hot summer weekend. So I started calling the police along the shore and hoping I'd find something. And there was nothing going on. And the cops just said, well, it was heavy traffic, you know, lots of people.

And so nobody asked. me to do this, but I started asking the death sergeant, I said, well, is this the worst traffic you've ever seen? And, you know, one after another, I said, nah, I mean, it's always bad on a summer weekend. You know, it's always like this. But I finally found one death sergeant who said, yeah, I guess I would say this is the worst traffic I've ever seen. So my story the next day is in the worst traffic, in what police called the worst traffic in history. And the story got pretty good play. It sounded like there was something important. You know, I was proud. I was getting better play for my story doing that. But I also knew even then as a young ambitious intern.

And I knew that this was something sleazy, that that's not really what was going on. And I then kept noticing in my journalistic career that journalists instinctively do this. We always try to find the bad angle. We always try to hype the bad stuff because we know it gets attention. As a science writer, you know, I'd write about these big sort of social problems like the population crisis, the energy crisis, the very things, and I would just keep noticing that when you actually step back, you know, from the immediate problem, whatever it was that was in the headline that day, if you actually looked at the long-term trend, you saw that things were getting better, but we would just focus on that bad stuff. And terrorism is just a great example of that, where terrorism did not really exist

until there was mass media, because there was no point in randomly killing a few people. It didn't achieve any military objective. But once, in the 19th century, once you had telegraphs, and you started getting wire services and newspapers that you could spread news very quickly, then terrorists started doing that. And basically, journalists, you know, become kind of the publicist for terrorists. I was in Iraq right after the invasion in 2003. It was interesting to me to see how much time we journalists spent there. The insurgents, you know, would detonate a bomb somewhere or just a simple IED along the road,

and we'd all be rushing off to cover it. And I really started thinking, why are we doing publicity for these? guys. But that was just our instinct to do them. So my experience, you know, over the years is I kept covering stuff and I kept trying to look at the big picture. Are things getting better or worse overall? What's the long-term trend? And I kept seeing that most things are getting better, even if we keep hyping the negative. And I eventually decided that this is, you know, terrorism is a great example because your odds of being killed by a terrorist are lower than your odds of dying in a bathtub. But 40% of Americans worry that they are their feelings.

family member is going to die in a terrorist attack because we have so frightened people with all these images of terrorism and all these warnings from people that, you know, it's an existential threat. I mean, terrorism is, you know, they're awful incidents, but they're not a military threat. They're no existential threat to civilization. And that's just one example. I mean, you see this politicians and journalists to it all the time. There are always, you know, new technology comes along and there's warnings, you know, of disaster. In the 19th century, the New York Times was And newspapers warned that the riding on a railroad would cause brain damage. It would turn people into railway madmen who suddenly would lose their minds.

And they worried that electric lights were damaging people's retinas. And there's always this market to scare people about things. And the overall result is what I call the crisis crisis. And I do think it is a genuine problem. And the three principles urge in that I try to follow when I'm looking at the news, when I'm seeing the latest scary news, the latest depressing and finding from somewhere around the world. The three principles that I follow are, number one, the world will always seem to be in crisis. Number two, the crisis is never as bad as it sounds.

And number three, the solution could easily make things worse. And that's interesting. So the story I like that of Chicken Little is a great example, I think. And in the lesson I think is more apt than ever today where Chicken Little, she overinterprets this acorn that fell and thinks the sky is falling, runs around, you know, just like a journalist today, scares everyone into thinking that the sky is falling and they need a solution. What can we do about that? And so the fox invites them into his den for shelter from the falling sky, and of course,

he has them for dinner. And that's what I think happens with a lot of these crises we see, is that we overreact to an imaginary or very hyped thread. And then we end up, there are a lot of foxes out there who are very happy to profit from our fear by proposing some solution that makes their lives better but actually hurts everyone else. What about gambling? It seems like the opposite thing is happening when it comes to gambling because you lose more than you win. That's how gambling works. And yet people get addicted to it because they're addicted to what, the positive emotion? I mean, it seems like the inverse of the negativity bias. You're right. It's a great example of because most people fear losses. you know, more than they value gains. So you're absolutely right. And most gamblers lose money. So how do they keep doing that? Some of it has to do with the neurochemistry of addiction that dopamine rush you get

and people then get it when they win and they want more of that. So there's that aspect of addiction to it. There's a really interesting experiment where these researchers brought a bunch of professional sports gamblers and had them make predictions for the coming weeks national football league games. And they Then they had them come in and they would basically collect on the bets that they won, and they would discuss about the ones that they didn't win and which ones they, and they would talk about all of them. And then they had them come back a little bit later and think back on those bets that they'd made. I mean, you would think that the betters would really want to talk about the games that they were right. You know, I knew the Redskins were going to upset somebody or I knew the 49ers would kill this team.

But what they found was that what the bettors really wanted, wanted to talk about were the near misses, basically that they had picked, say, the 49ers to beat the Chiefs. But the Chiefs won in the last minute, maybe because of a fumble or the referee made a really bad call that enabled the team to win. So they would basically rationalize this loss to themselves and say, well, I did pick the better team there. It was just a bad break. So in their own mind, they were rewriting their one loss record. If they picked the team, that actually won. They counted that as a win, even if the team that they picked won just because it was lucky by one of those bad calls and actually played worse. They counted all that in their

favor. And then they gave themselves, they rewrote history to make those other games to say, well, I was really right about that one. It was just a bit of bad luck, some bad refereeing that cost me that. So in their minds, they managed to kind of change history a little bit and think, well, I actually was right on most of the games. If it hadn't been for exceptionally bad luck, I would have won. Now, what they do also, it's something that all of us can do to some extent that when we look out at the world today, you know, the negativity effect is in full force, that we overreact to dangers, we just seize on the negative and pay attention to that the most.

But when we look back at the past, you know, some things will stay with us a long time, and the involuntary memories that come into your mind. to be negative. I mean, that's what trauma is. It's just an awful event happened that you can't get out of your mind, that it just keeps coming back. But when we are voluntarily, consciously remembering the past, we have what researchers call a tendency to put on rose-colored glasses. And this is another one of the bodies of the brain's natural defenses against a negativity effect. It's our way of countering negativity by accentuating the positive. So they found, for instance, that sports teams, Now, when there's a really bad loss in the World Series, when, you know, Bruckner made that error that, you know, the cost this team of the World Series, that, of course, remains in people's memories forever. But in general, sports fans remember their team's championship season better than the losing season. And now you think, well, the negativity effect, shouldn't the losses be more memorable than the gains? But what happens is that they replay those winning seasons so often in their minds.

They see them on television, the highlights being played. They talk about it with their friends. They might have memorabilia from it. So they replay that so often, they strengthen that memory, so they have better memories of those good seasons. And that's one way that we can counter the negativity effect. It's the kind of, in the book we talk about playing glad games, these ways to boost negativity, accentuate the positive. And that's, in a way, is kind of a glad game.

How you overcome it. We see this in sports as well. Golfers avoid bogies and put short. Coaches punt on fourth and short. And you asked the question in your book, what would happen if we took a little bit more chances? One of the practical ideas out of this is that it's better to follow a rule instead of following your gut. What do you mean by this? Well, one of the biggest problems, we think that the biggest addiction of all, the biggest problem of all is an addiction to safety.

And that's because of the negativity effect, the power of bad. We fear bad so much. We're so affected by it that we don't want to risk anything bad going wrong. And sports is a great example of this. where we give a couple of examples. One is in golf. They've done really interesting studies of the way Tiger Woods and other pros put.

And they care much more about avoiding a bogey than making a birdie. And they put differently. So that if they've got two strokes to make it, they're so fearful of overshooting the hole on that one putt by so much that they'll end up making a boge because they're so far away that they don't put as hard and they don't try as hard to get it in the hole.

So they end up avoiding bogeys. They end up getting more pars. But they lose chances to get birdies. And they figure that this costs the average pro $600,000 a year if he would just put normally instead of having this safety addiction that he's so afraid of bogeys. But the greatest example is with football coaches. You know, these guys are paid millions of dollars to make smart decisions. They run statistics.

They hire, you know, all kinds of coaches and analysts. But every week, so many of them stupidly punt on fourth down. And, you know, this has been analyzed to death. by statisticians. And punting on fourth down when you have, you know, a couple yards to go, it sort of made sense in the old days when offenses didn't move very well. It was mostly a running game. And so field position was everything. It was worth it to try to get the ball 40 yards down the field. But today, offenses move so quickly. And they score so often, they score so much more than in the past that it's so much more valuable to keep the ball than it is to, you know, punt the

all 40 yards down the field. Yet coaches continually, they've got fourth and one, fourth and two, and they just punt the ball and give it away and give the other team a chance to score and sacrifice their own chance to score. And when the numbers crunchers look at this, they figure that if you have fourth and short, you know, fourth and one or fourth and two, you should go for it, depending in exactly which analysis you use, you should go for it anywhere beyond your own eight-yard line, anywhere beyond your own 20-yard line. Yet coaches will be at the 50-yard line or the 40-yard line, and they're still just punting the ball down the field.

And the reason for that is a safety addiction, that they are so afraid, what if we fail there? Everyone's going to blame me. People say there was a loss of momentum, and the other team is going to score. I'll get blamed for that. It'll be on the highlights real. I don't want to make that mistake.

I don't want to be the goat. It's safer to just punt. No one will blame me for that. Now, I mean, one way to deal with that, I think, is we ought to really start counting when a coach punts and the other team scores, that ought to be counted against him. Why did you give up the ball? You could have tried for it instead.

It's not thought of that way. And sportscasters, I think, are the worst at this, where so many of them are there, oh, my God, he's going for it on the 50-yard line, fourth and three. Can you believe he's being reckless? No, I mean, the statisticians would say, no, he should absolutely go for it. Because, you know, in fourth and short, you make it more than half the time, usually. And you keep the ball, and you keep a chance to score. In the book, in the Power of Bad, we talk about one coach.

who has managed to overcome the safety addiction. He's a high school coach in Arkansas, Kevin Kelly, and he looked at the numbers. He said, yeah, you're right. It's crazy to keep giving the ball away. I should be going forward on fourth. And there have been other coaches who also look at the numbers and say, yeah, you know, they're right. I'm going to do it more often. But when the moment actually comes during a game, they'll come up with an excuse not to. They'll say, well, one of my linemen is injured, and my running back is having a bad day, or the other defense is really tough against the run, whatever. They'll come up with this sort of gut reason not to do it and play it safe,

and it's just much more comfortable. So what he did was he just said, I'm not going to trust my gut. I'm not going to make a gut decision on the sideline there when there'll be this temptation to just play it safe and so no one will blame me. So he set up very specific rules about when he was going to pun and when he wouldn't. And it tightened them.

The first season he did it, I think he punted about one. a game and he then tighten the rule so that he now punts like once a season. He goes for it all the time. He also, he never goes for field goals either. He always goes for a touchdown. And the guy has been phenomenally successful. His team had never gotten beyond the semifinals of the state championship. Since he's been there, they're in the semifinals practically every year. They've won seven or eight state championships. He's the all-USA football coach of the year. They average 50 points a game. But even though, people see how successful he is. He, and he gets invited to give speeches around the country about this strategy. And he says, you know, all these other coaches and athletic directors will come up to him

and say, God, that makes so much sense. And then he said, well, you're going to do it? And they go, oh, no, I just can't afford to take the risk myself. They've still, they're still these, I could lose my job. Or they have these reasons, well, it might work for you, but it wouldn't work for me. You know, he's wondered, even athletic directors, he said he's this incredibly successful high school coach and been approached occasionally by athletic directors or colleges, small colleges, and he says these colleges have terrible teams. They never win. You think that they'd want to try something new, but no, the athletic director's afraid.

If it fails, they'll get fired. Of course. And we all have that tendency to be safety addicts and to focus so much on the bad that we don't look at the big picture. And we just let our gut fears stop us from doing stuff that would actually help us succeed. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, John Tierney. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great

discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. Now for the conclusion of our episode with John Tierney. The rule that you gave in the book behind this idea that it's better to follow a rule instead of your gut. The rule is do what someone would do if they were not going to suffer the loss themselves. So pretend you're a disinterested party. This dampens the emotional impact of making the decision. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because this is a really good

idea. It's kind of like, what would you do if you were in my shoes? Well, if I were in your shoes, I'd be addicted to safety and I'd play it safe. But if I'm playing with your money, here's what I would do. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, he does it in football, and they've done this in lab experiments when they, the whole negativity effect, you know, some of the first evidence came out of these experiments where they would say to someone, would you make an even money bet on this? You know, we'll flip a coin and we'll just do it for, you know, even money. And they found that they would actually have to offer people, I'll give you $2 if you win and you only pay me a dollar if you'll lose, even though people know, flipping the coins and even money thing, but, you know, they would need twice as much reward in

order to take the bet. And they would watch how people were safety addicts, how they were irrationally cautious when it came to which bets they would make. Even when the odds favored them, they were still reluctant to take a bet that over the long haul would make them a fair amount of money. But they also found, in those experiments, they would sometimes basically ask you to make my bets for me, that you'd be looking at me and you'd say, and it would be your decision, it's my money, but you're deciding how it goes. And in that case, you would be much more rational than I was. You would basically take the good bets when it favored you instead of being afraid of them. And I think that's because of the way the negativity affects it. It's really this

personal sense of loss, you know, that I'm scared something's going to hurt me personally. You know, the brain is wired to just overreact to these threats and it just basically shuts down your rational thinking. You're going by your gut. But when you're deciding what to do with my money, it's not a personal threat to you. You don't have that same gut reaction. So you can actually use your rational brain and make a much smarter decision. You know, that's something that applies in, you know, gambling. It applies in lots of things. We have a chapter on relationships. And, you know, the key thing in relationships is we tend to think of all the good things we do for our partner. I've done this and I've done that. But what really matters is what you don't do. What really

matters is avoiding negativity, both in what you do to annoy your partner, but also in how you react when something goes wrong. That if you blame your partner, if you don't give your partner the benefit of the doubt. If you respond in a hostile or angry way, bad emotions are just so powerful and so contagious that it's very easy for a minor disagreement, it just turns into a major fight because they escalate back and you escalate and something that, you know, was tiny to begin with becomes major. And so one of the strategies that we suggest for dealing this is bringing in a referee. I mean, if you have to, and there were interesting experiments about bringing in an imaginary referee. Where they ask couples, they would say, think about the last disagreement you have. You know,

can you imagine how a disinterested third party would look at that argument? How might they look at that argument? What would they think about it? What would they suggest? And just forcing you to step outside of your own feelings of anger, your own feelings, I can't believe my partner did this to me. How could they do this? but forcing yourself to just step back and say, how would a third person look at this? That gives you the perspective to make a much more rational decision and basically avoid that negative spiral that can creep into relationships. That seems like a really wise idea. And it kind of goes to the negative golden rule.

I'd love to hear you explain this because it's kind of hard to imagine how a negative golden rule would work. Well, you know, we tend to think that it's the good stuff that matters. You know, in The Power of Bad, we use a great novel by Anthony Trollope called He Knew He Was Right. It was 19th century novel, and it's a story about this couple that has everything. I got money, good looks, the wonderful family. And the marriage just falls apart for no apparent reason. Nobody does anything wrong, but they just keep misinterpreting each other's actions.

You know, he speaks to her in a very rude way, and she's offended, and then she doesn't listen to him. And it just builds up, and it ends up in absolute disaster. The whole family's destroyed. And the novel seemed at the time, it wasn't a big success that seemed unrealistic. Why did this couple, why was it destroyed? But it's actually, it does, it was a very shrewd sense where, you know, where this novelist you saw the negativity effect. And, you know, the best advice in the novel was the wife's sister, you know, the wife

was very up in arms because her husband said something to her. And the sister says, you know, no, he didn't really mean that he wasn't insulting your honor. he wasn't suggesting you would ever be unfaithful to him. He was just a little of that. And she says, if I were you, I would forget it. And that's the best, if she's just done that, they could have saved the marriage. And if he had followed his own friend's advice who told him to forget it, that would be fine too. So the negative golden rule basically is that in relationships, and they found this by tracking couples to see which marriages survive and which ones don't. And they look at how couples interact, they look at the good emotions they have for each other, the enthusiasm, they look at the

negative interactions they have. And what they find over and over again is that the good stuff is not what keeps marriages alive, that the marriages that last, what is important is avoiding negativity and dealing with negativity calmly and not letting it spiral. You know, we say that we like to think of all the good stuff we do for people about going the extra mile, but what really matters is what you don't do on to others. That's negative golden rule. It's what you do not do on to others. really matters. I think all of us can appreciate the time we did something stupid and our spouse looks at us and just kind of smiles or shrugs it off or maybe shakes their head but doesn't give you a lot of, you don't get what you deserve, which is like a really, you just did that,

you're such an idiot. You know, like you know you already did it. And then of course, when somebody escalates something and you actually have the presence of mind to not do anything about it the other day I had been moving my seat back in the car and I heard our car seat in the back, which didn't have a baby in it, kind of make a popping sound because I had probably broken something by, you know, moving the seat back too far. And Jen goes, my wife goes, you move the seat back too far again. And now the seat popped off and I'm going to have to redo it. And I thought, I could argue about why is it in there when there's no kid in there and why did you put it so far forward and how am I supposed to sit in the car when the seat's so far forward? But I'm just

going to not because I think we both know that it's not going to do anything, but it's very hard to do that in the moment. And you know this. Everyone knows this, right? You want to be like, here's eight ways that I'm right and you're wrong because it feels good, kind of. Right. And you feel so attacked when someone criticizes you. I mean, one of the basic things, the couples therapy is always you don't say you're a bad person or you did something wrong. You say, I feel bad when you do that. And it makes, it does make a huge difference because you're not accusing them. You're saying, you know, I feel bad about this. It is different from saying you really did something awful. It just doesn't affect you in the same way. We quote the advice from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

the Supreme Court Justice, on her wedding day, her mother-in-law said to her, in every marriage, it sometimes helps to be a little deaf. You know, that just being able, what you did there was not, you know, let's not argue about the seat. Let's just let it slide. And you're lucky if you have, you know, And when you say when your spouse will just kind of let something slide, that is so important is just giving them the benefit of the doubt and not escalating. It really makes a big difference. And researchers, they found that successful couples, they develop what are called positive illusions and that they have unrealistically positive views of their mates.

And they've even done this with brain scans where they did these where they scanned the brains of people who were in love. And then they went back several years later. and they saw which couples were still together. And they went back and looked at the initial brain scans to try and see, you know, what pattern did they see among the couples that were destined for success

and the ones that were destined to break up? And they weren't sure what they were looking for, but they were surprised to find big difference was in a part of the brain that is associated with making negative judgments. And basically, when these people were shown a photograph in the brain scanner of their beloved, that part of the brain that makes negative judgments was shutting down.

You know, they just weren't exercising negative judgment when it came to their partner. And that's the positive illusions. And it's a great thing if you can do it. The other good thing about they found in tracking couples for a while that they'll see that one partner has a much higher view of their partner's ability. Like, I think he's smarter. I think she's smarter. I think she's something this. Then she does herself. And that's this positive. illusion that I have an exalted view of my partner. But the good thing is it's great for the marriage because your partner appreciates. And eventually they start to believe it too. So everybody feels better. So it's good if you can give them the benefit of the doubt. And also, you know,

if you can just not take the bait when something bad goes on. How does this work in work environments? We know that there's occasionally negative people or often negative people in work environments and they can really poison the entire environment. We had Bob Sutton on the show a few years ago and he wrote the no asshole rule, and it was about not letting negative people bring everyone down in a workspace. And in his case, in an academic space, this is interesting because I think a lot of bosses think, well, we got this guy, but, or this gal, and they're awful, but they're so good at sales. They're our main tech lead. They're so talented in every other way. They make us money, but that's not really true. Right. And Bob Sutton, the No Asshole rule, is great. I love that book.

And now I talked to Bob in writing this book because, you know, that book started out of the no-asshole rule, started from a faculty meeting at Stanford where, you know, they were thinking of hiring someone and they said, yeah, he's a great researcher, but I just don't want any assholes ruining our department. And so they had that rule after that. And then after he wrote that article for the Harvard Business Review and he wrote a book about it, he then discovered this paper by Roy Baummeister, my co-author, the paper that identified, the first identified the negativity effect. There's a much-sided paper called Bad is Stronger Than Good, where he showed that bad was stronger than good across all these different domains. And Bob told me, Bob Sutton told me, it's always his graduate student's favorite paper that has really shaped his research. Once you realize this negativity effect, you know, he saw one aspect of it that it's much more important in a business to avoid bad apples. He calls them assholes. The more polite term the researchers use is bad apples. that one bad apple just does so much more damage than one good person can undo.

You know, when they find, and we talk in our book about research showing that when you look at how well a team is going to do, the researchers who were trying to predict this by looking at the personalities and the abilities of the members of the team, and they figured that if you get the average ability, you know, me figure out what the average of the team is, that'll predict how well they'll do. And what they found actually, what actually predicted the performance was the ability of the worst person on the team because they would just drag the whole team down. And there were some very clever experiments where they identified three different varieties of bad apples. And the layman's term for them were the jerk, the slacker, and the downer. And they trained an actor to play

each of these roles. And he would then be, you know, secretly added to one team to see how they would perform. There was a bunch of business students who had to do a product, to drop some kind of a marketing plan for a company, some kind of project. And so he would join a team. And when he was the jerk, he would sit there and people would suggest something and he'd go, have you ever taken a business class before? You know, or just looking like, are you serious? And when he was the downer, he would imagine in his own mind that his cat had just died. And he'd just sit down and like put his head on the table. He just wouldn't do anything. And he just would look depressed. And then he would play the slacker sometimes. And that would be, he would basically, the team would be sitting there and he'd just

be leaning back, you know, looking at his phone and just basically playing with his phone and ignoring them. And, you know, what they found was that, you know, adding this guy to the team would really hurt the team's performance. But what was really the most surprising thing from, and aside from confirming the extraordinary impact of bad apples, what the researchers were surprised to see was not only did he hurt the team by basically not contributing, his behavior was so contagious that when he was a jerk to someone, when he would insult someone else, they would not only retaliate against him. You know, the other people on the team started being nasty to each other. It just set the whole tone. When he was a downer, pretty much the whole team would just start basically say, ah, yeah, that'll never work. Yeah, yeah, forget it.

Let's just, you know, and when he was a slacker not working, they'd start saying, whatever, let's just get this over with. Who cares? You know, it's so. so contagious that bad behavior. You know, other studies in the workplace have shown that familiar, you know, that rule of four, as we call it, that when they track people's interactions during the day and the effect they have on people's moods in the office, they find that basically one bad interaction has as much impact that it takes four good interactions to make up for that. That's just one nasty moment, one bad thing, has this big effect, has a disproportionate

impact. So it's really important. So, as you say, even, you know, somebody who. who's great at some aspects of the job, maybe he does make a lot of sales, but if he's bringing down everyone else, then it's hurting. You know, there's an example where it was at men's warehouse where they had one salesman who was by far the best salesman in the store. But he was also as a jerk. He wouldn't help the other salesman. He'd steal their customers. He'd do this. So they eventually fired him. And nobody else at the store ever had sales numbers as good as his. But the overall

sales numbers at the store went up just by getting rid of him. So you've really got to keep that in mind that it's so important to avoid hiring bad apples if you can. So the more interviews you can do, the more you can watch somebody working with other people before you actually hire them, that will save you an awful lot of grief later on. And then if you do have a bad apple there, there's a temptation to say, well, yeah, you know, he's not pulling his weight or he's kind of a jerk, but that's all right. We have some other people. We'll make up for it. But you've got to remember that that behavior is contagious and it's really, it's affecting everyone else. So the sooner you can deal with it, the better. What if that person is the boss? Well, then, you know, then I think the thing

to do is look for another job. Yeah. You know, one thing that, and I think Sutton has pointed out this out of the No asshole rule, too, that if you've got a bad apple, a jerk who behaves in a certain way, and maybe you've tolerated him, if you let him hire people, you know, if he's working under you, but he's got his own department and he's hiring people, they often will start hiring people like themselves. So then you really start getting a problem because, you know, they like someone who's really aggressive and abrasive and you've really got to be careful there

but not letting them reproduce and take over the place because then you just get this really dysfunctional environment. And I think if it's your boss, you either, you know, you go, you know, try to get yourself transferred. If there's a boss above him, you can go to to complain, that's one thing. but I think sometimes all you can do is just look for another job. Bad apples, I mean, you can try to talk to them and say, this is what I need. And I guess in following some of the principles in the book,

you know, you don't, you know, you want to keep the negativity effect in mind and you don't want to sit down and say, you're a jerk or you treat me badly. You just say, you know, you try to keep it positive. And for me to work best, it would help if I hear this. And if you could do this, that would really help me instead of saying, I think you're a terrible boss. But, you know, Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. We've got to get out of the studio soon, but I want to leave on the idea that we can do something about this most of the time. The low, bad diet. Can you take us through this?

You've brought us through the rule of four. So for every bad interaction, every news story that's negative, let's read four good ones. But what is the low bad diet in practice? The low bad diet is, you know, we're surrounded by bad stuff all the time. And as we've said, the negativity effect, there's a good reason. reason it evolved that it basically kept our, you know, our ancestors on the Savannah alert to deadly threats. It kept them alive like, you know, predatory lions, paying attention to poisonous berries. So there's a good reason it did, but the analogy is that there was a reason that the ancient

hunter-gatherers wanted to load up on calories in lean times. That was a great survival strategy when food was sparse. But that same instinct to load up on fat and calories is not so great when you live in an environment where you're surrounded by junk food all day long. So the same thing happens the day where this instinct to be alert to threats is useful. But if you're surrounded all day by people trying to scare you and basically hyping threats and inventing threats, that's not good because it's giving you a very distorted view of the world. And you're thinking things are worse than they are. It's terrible for your mood. And it gives you, you start voting for people who are selling you on fear all the time, that the world's going to hell and you've got to vote for

me and do this or you've got to do, and they keep you in fear. So what we suggest is, you know, try to remember that rule of four and, you know, try to look at four uplifting stories for every negative one. You want to go on a low, bad diet. And one way to do that is, I mean, I've been in the mass media, but the mass media really thrives on negativity because the easiest way to get a mass audience is with common fears. We all share the same fears. So it's easy to get a mass audience that way. The positive stuff that interests us tends to be much, more idiosyncratic. You might have an interest in civil war history and, you know, and Asian art in a certain kind of music. Those are smaller niche things. But the great thing

about the web today is you can find your niche. You can find the group on Facebook, you find a website for it. You can do it. And the great thing about social media, it gets a bad rap that it's blamed for, you know, lots of things like Instagram envy and Facebook depression, which we debunk to some extent in the book. It's the usual thing of journalists hyping problems. And there are problems on social media. But in general, the good thing about social media is that it is more positive than mass media. The people tend to share stuff. I mean, we hear about the bad stuff on social media, people on Twitter who the Twitter wars and people could be so nasty and cancel culture. And all that does happen. But in general, people share more

positive things than negative by a big margin. And if you share positive stuff, you actually end up getting more followers on Twitter, your tweets go more wildly. So there's an incentive to be positive. And if you can curate what you want so that you're following people who aren't trying to scare you, who aren't just fighting the other side in politics, denouncing the other side, if you can follow people who are more positive, who share all the good things that's going on in life. That's the low, bad diet. And that's going to make you happier. And it really is going to show you a more accurate view of the world. Because, you know, as we explain in the power of bad, virtually every measure of human well-being is improving except for one hope. You know, the richer we get,

you know, the less people tend to think that, you know, the things are good. And it's people in the richest countries who sound the most pessimistic at international surveys. And, you know, we're the luckiest people in history to be alive now because things are, there are so many things have improved for so many people in the world, but we don't recognize it. If you go on a low, bad diet, I think you can start to see the world as it really is and realize that there is much more to celebrate than to mourn. We say that bad is stronger than good. It's always going to be stronger than good, but we're confident that good can still prevail. John, thank you very much, really enlightening and good to know that we can escape the gravity of the negativity bias and that

sometimes it's even good for us. Thank you, Jordan. Big thanks to John Tierney for coming on the show today. His book is called The Power of Bad, how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it. By the way, after the show, John and I talked about how negative experiences can be anchored to things like flavors. So if you have a certain kind of alcohol that got you really sick early in your life and you can still kind of feel yourself getting a little bit of the gag reflex, that's part of what's going on here. I know for me with tequila I can still taste, well, the shame. Also for businesses, There's a lot of practical takeaways here for business owners, one of which is you can't just correct issues. Let's say your customer says, oh, you know, I went in my room and the pillow was on the floor.

I don't want to sleep on something that was on the floor. You can't just correct the issue. You have to overwhelm the customer with positive to make up for it psychologically. So you have that one negative requires four positives to make up for it. That holds true even in relationships. It holds true in business. A couple of examples that he gave were flights shouldn't, with a weight at the baggage claim. It's anti-climactic. It's not fun. It's not a good impression. Shopping

shouldn't end with a checkout line. There should be something else that not just minimizes this, but is actually an uplifting or positive experience. And if you run a business and you get some negative reviews, always respond to negative reviews so it's not the last thing people see. So if you have a negative review and Yelp, for example, respond to that review so that the review reader actually sees your response after the negative. So there's a positive, hopefully. after the negative and here's a little trick based on research make your response longer than the negative review so if it's this place sucks one star i hate it here make sure you write a few sentences let's say four to one i don't know if the sentence ratio necessarily holds but why not make it

two to one four to one make it longer and it will have more weight psychologically i found that completely fascinating we just didn't get a chance to fit it into our show when we did the edit so i hope you enjoy this i thought this was a fascinating episode Also in the show notes, there's going to be a worksheet with all of these practicals in there, including the ones I mentioned and possibly a few that didn't make the show. We also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using tiny habits, using systems in just a few minutes per day.

Go ahead and sign up for free. It's always free. There's no upsells. I got nothing to sell you. You don't have to enter your credit card. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Why am I doing it? Because, honestly, the world's a better place when everybody knows how to network and help one another in an effective way that doesn't take forever and doesn't require that much effort.

That's the whole point. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't kick the can down the road. Don't think you'll do it later. You got to dig the well before you get thirsty. You can't make up for lost time when it comes to relationships, whether it's for business or personal reasons. The drills take a couple minutes a day. This stuff is crucial, and it's all free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us. You'll be in smart company. In fact, why not reach out to John and tell him you enjoyed this episode of the show? Show guests love hearing from you, and you never know what might shake out of that. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger and Jason DeFilippo.

Engineered by Jay Sanderson. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. Music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. So if you know somebody who maybe suffers a little bit too much from the negativity bias, or needs a little bit of a reality check and know that things aren't so bad. It might just be your mind playing tricks on you and you're normal just like everybody else. If you know someone like that, go ahead and share this episode with them. Share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

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