Negativity bias: what it is and how it influences our thinking

The negativity bias predisposes us to focus our attention on the negative.

How many of us have been bothered more by being told something bad than by being told something good?

Human beings give more importance to what we see as negative than to what we consider positive or neutral. This phenomenon is what has been called negativity biasand it is a concept that we will look at in more detail below.

What is negativity bias?

Negativity bias, or the negativity effect, is the tendency to give the tendency to give greater importance to negative aspects of a given event, person, or situation.person or situation. It is the fact of giving more relevance to negative stimuli over those that may be positive or neutral. This psychological phenomenon has also been called positivity-negativity asymmetry and has a very significant impact on our daily lives.

For example, this phenomenon is the one that allows us to understand why people, when we meet someone new and we know a negative feature of it, it seems that we focus exclusively on bad characteristics of it. This would generate a negative first impression, which would be very difficult to change in the long run.

It also explains why people tend to remember more those experiences in which some kind of traumatic event has occurred or that we did not like, rather than those that we did not like.We are more likely to remember those experiences in which some kind of traumatic event occurred or that we did not like, rather than those that were pleasurable. We are more likely to remember insults rather than praise, we react more strongly to negative stimuli than to positive ones, and we tend to think more often about the bad things that have happened to us rather than the good things that have happened to us.

Elements that make up the phenomenon

When trying to explain the negativity bias, researchers Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman proposed the existence of four elements that compose it, which allow us to understand in more detail and depth how this phenomenon occurs.These allow us to understand in more detail and depth how this asymmetry between positive and negative occurs.

Negative power

Negative potency refers to the fact that when two events have the same intensity and emotionality but are of different signs, i.e. one positive and one negative, they do not have the same degree of salience. The negative event will arouse greater interest than a positive event with the same degree of emotionality and intensity.

Both Rozin and Royzman argue that this difference in the salience of positive and negative stimuli is only comparable, empirically, by means of situations that assume the same degree of intensity.. If a positive stimulus has a much higher emotional involvement than another stimulus, in this case a negative one, it is to be expected that in this situation the positive stimulus will be better remembered.

2. Negative inequality

When an event, whether positive or negative, is approaching in time and space, the degree to which they are perceived as positive or negative is different.. A negative event will be perceived as much more negative as it gets closer compared to a positive event.

To understand this better: let us imagine two situations involving the same degree of intensity, the beginning of the school year, seen as negative, and the end of the school year, seen as positive. As the beginning of the school year approaches, this event is increasingly perceived as something much more negative than the end of the school year, which is perceived as something that is progressively more positive but not as positive.

3. Negative dominance

Negative dominance refers to the tendency for the combination of both positive and negative aspects of the event to be perceived as much more negative than the end of the course. combination of both positive and negative aspects results in something more negative than it should be. than it should theoretically be.

That is, the whole is much more negative than the sum of the parts, even if among these parts there is something that is positive.

4. Negative differentiation

Negative differentiation refers to how people conceptualize the idea of negativity. conceptualize the idea of negativity in a much more complex way than the idea of positivity..

This idea is not surprising if we try to make the effort to count how many words in our vocabulary are related to negative aspects. We would get a larger list than if we focused on positive words.

Negativity bias, evolution and biology.

There have been attempts to give an evolutionary and biologistic explanation to the fact that people pay more attention to negative aspects than to positive ones. In the following we will see what are the evolutionary and Biological bases behind the negativity bias.

1. Evolutionary basis

According to neuroscientist Rick Hanson, the negativity bias has an evolutionary character. According to him, this phenomenon is a consequence of evolution, given that early human ancestors learned to make intelligent decisions based on the risk involved in making them. involved in making them. Those humans who remembered negative events better and avoided them had a longer life expectancy than those who took more risks.

This pattern of behavior is the one that survived, passing from generation to generation, and this bias is now common throughout the human species, given its great adaptive implication in the past.

The human brain was molded to give greater importance to negative aspects, to pay more attention to them and to take into account potentially dangerous events for the physical, emotional and psychological integrity of the individual.

2. Biological basis

Studies carried out by the American psychologist John Cacioppo showed that the neural processing of the negativity bias implies a greater activation at the brain level compared to the compared to the observation of positive phenomena.

This would be the biological explanation that would support why human beings focus more on the negative than on the positive, going hand in hand with the evolutionary explanation of the previous point.

What we have seen in the research

Next we will see in detail some of the aspects observed about the negativity bias and its relationship with social and cognitive processes.

1. Formation of impressions

As we have already seen, the negativity bias significantly influences the formation of first impressions of a person we have just met, something that has considerable social implications.

According to the above, negative information about a person exerts a greater weight in the elaboration of a general outline of that person, i.e., an impression, than negative information about a person, i.e., an impression, which has considerable social implications.that is, an impression, than the positive information we have been made aware of about that person.

Even if both positive and neutral aspects are known, the negative ones end up prevailing, influencing impression formation, something that is perfectly understandable if one of the elements of this bias is taken into account: negative dominance.

Another explanation given to explain why the negativity bias occurs in social contexts is the idea that people believe that negative data about someone helps us establish a reliable diagnosis about them. help us to establish a reliable diagnosis about their personality..

Negative information is supposed to be more reliable than positive data, which may be exaggerated or seen as the result of chance.

This often explains voting intentions. Many voters tend to give more importance to the bad things a candidate has done and avoid voting for him/her instead of giving importance to the desired candidate's information that turns out to be positive.

2. Cognition and attention

Negative information seems to involve a greater movement of resources at the cognitive level than positive information.In addition, there is greater activity at the cortical level when more attention is paid to the bad than to the good.

Bad news, negative traits of someone, traumatic events... all these aspects act as a kind of magnet on our attention.

People tend to think more about those terms that turn out to be negative rather than positive, the large vocabulary of negative concepts being an example of this.

3. Learning and memory

Learning and memory are direct consequences of attention.. The greater the attention focused on a given event or phenomenon, the more likely it is to be learned and retained in memory.

An example of this, although controversial, is the way in which punishment exerts a greater weight on memory than reward.

When someone is punished for doing something wrong, they are more likely to avoid doing the behavior that caused them harm, whereas when they are rewarded for doing something right, they are more likely to forget about it in the long run.

While this should not this should not motivate parents to punish their children more frequently for anything, but it is for anything, it is interesting to see how the processing of negative events, in this case punishment, seems to have a significant impact on children's education.

4. Decision-making

Studies on the negativity bias have also focused on how it influences decision-making ability, especially in situations of risk avoidance or fear of loss.

When a situation arises in which the person can either gain something or lose something, the potential costs, something negative, seem more important than the potential gains, the potential costs, something negative, seem to be of greater importance than the possible gains..

This consideration of potential losses and avoidance goes hand in hand with the concept of negative power proposed by Rozin and Royzman.

Bibliographical references:

• Rozin, P.; Royzman, E. B. (2001). "Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 5 (4): 296-320. doi:10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2.
• Peeters, G. (1971). "The positive-negative asymmetry: On cognitive consistency and positivity bias". European Journal of Social Psychology. 1 (4): 455-474. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2420010405.