How to put your negativity bias to good use

Negativity bias in action

It’s the end of the quarter, the company has announced it’s facing some serious challenges, and you’re consumed with worry – despite the fact that your leadership got stellar ratings in the quarterly report.

This is the negativity bias in action: our tendency to pay more heed to criticism, setbacks, and threats than to positive news. In the words of Baumeister et al,. “Bad is stronger than good.” This bias works on three levels:

• Species

  We all experience some form of negativity bias: wiring shaped by an environment where failing to detect a threat has a greater cost than failing to spot an opportunity.

• Personality

  We all experience it, but with differing intensity. Optimists’ attention drifts away from negative information; pessimists’ attention lingers on it (Segerstrom, 2001; Isaacowitz, 2005).

• Moment

  The “volume” of the bias rises and falls in the same individual depending on sleep, pressure, and context. This is the level we can work on most immediately.

Why ‘moment’ goes under the radar

The first two levels have simple explanations: “It’s human nature.” “I’m a pessimist.” The impact of the moment is harder to explain due to a phenomenon Clore and Bar-Anan call “affect-as-information,” whereby positive or negative mood provides information that affects evaluative judgment. (In a 2008 study, for example, describes how participants rated their lives as less satisfying when taking part in the study if it was raining. But when the interviewer casually asked participants what the weather was doing before they were asked to rate their life satisfaction, the difference between the responses disappeared.) In other words, being made aware of the source of a mood loosens its grip.