We all have a negativity bias and often succumb to its influence. It’s as if our brain has a magnet to fix negative experiences easily forgetting the positive ones. For example, you may remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when the September 11, 2001 attack occurred, but you may not remember what you were doing the following month. This negativity bias helps keep us safe, but it can also sink us into pessimism. That’s why it’s important to learn to recognize it and know how to manage it.
What is Negativity Bias?
Negativity bias, also known as negativity bias or negativity effect, refers to our propensity to pay attention, learn, and use negative rather than positive information. It’s a sort of asymmetry in how we process events and understand the world, causing negative stimuli to elicit faster and more prominent responses than positive ones.
Negativity bias may explain why we remember insults more than compliments and hold them longer in our minds. It also explains why we react more strongly to adverse events or why we pay more attention to negative than positive news. This bias also explains why, although we experience several positive events during the day, at night we tend to focus on the one negative thing that happened to us.
This tendency towards negativity is scientifically proven. A study conducted at the University of Michigan revealed that negative news tends to dominate the media because it generates more psychophysiological reactions in readers, who tend to be more attentive to negative news than to positive news.
We have a brain that is hyper-responsive to anything negative
An experiment conducted by psychologist John Cacioppo highlighted the tendency of our brain to react more intensely to stimuli it considers negative. In his study of him, he showed a group of people a series of images that elicited positive, negative, or neutral feelings. Meanwhile he was recording electrical activity in the cerebral cortex, which reflects the level of information processing.
He thus saw that stimuli that generate negative emotions such as fear or anger cause an increase in electrical activity in the brain. In practice, our brain regularly evaluates the risks that people and situations may pose for safety reasons. Negative events capture our attention more than positive ones and generate greater activation in the brain.
Our tendency to pay more attention to bad news is likely an evolutionary adaptation to protect ourselves from danger, as we need to be able to spot threatening signs quickly to avoid them.
The problem begins when the negativity bias spreads to all spheres of life, fueling a pessimistic view or making us believe that the world is a dangerous and hostile place where we can never let our guard down. So it’s not difficult to fall into anxiety.
In fact, a study conducted at the University of Lübeck found that “the formation of beliefs about oneself is surprisingly negatively biased in situations that could be opportunities for improvement” . This means that our tendency towards negativity also deprives us of opportunities for growth and learning.
Magic Proportion: How much positivity do we need to compensate for the negativity bias?
We can offset the negativity bias by focusing on the positives to gain a more balanced perspective. But because of the disproportionate weight our brain places on negative events, this balance doesn’t mean a 50-50 ratio.
John Gottman and Robert Levenson attempted to find out what the “magic proportion” is. To do this, they analyzed hundreds of couples. They carefully recorded the amount of time the couples spent discussing or interacting positively. Thus they discovered that the most balanced and satisfied couples with their relationship are those who know how to dose the amount of positivity and negativity.
The magic ratio is five to one. In other words, five times as many positive feelings and interactions need to occur in a relationship to counter a negative event. This relationship applies to other spheres of our lives. This explains why the occasional positive experiences, such as a birthday party or a trip, are pleasant, but don’t have the necessary impact on our brain to undo the negativity bias of so many small negative events. We need to make sure we have frequent small positive experiences to tip the balance towards happiness.
In addition to savoring the positive moments, to maximize their impact on our brain it is also important to learn to silence the negative self-talk . We need to start paying more attention to the types of thoughts that are going through our minds.
After an event, even a good one, we might focus on the little details that went wrong or weren’t perfect. When these thoughts come into play, we must apply cognitive defusion techniques to prevent them from harming us.
It’s also convenient that we learn to reevaluate the situation. Whether we realize that we are interpreting something negatively or only focus on the negatives, we need to focus to find the positive. Of course, it’s not about ignoring the potential dangers, it’s just about developing a more balanced view to compensate for the negativity bias we all have.