The more senior you get, the more you are on stage all the time. You are exposed, especially in high-stakes, high-pressure situations. The old saying that leaders need to “communicate, communicate, communicate” still holds true because people don’t listen. Instead, they watch. Worse, as they watch you, people are more likely to notice – and gossip about – those moments when you are not your best self.
This feels unjust, but it is human nature. One of the most robustly replicated findings in psychology over the past 30 years is the so-called “negativity bias”. In their book, The Power of Bad, summarizing the research in this area, John Tierney and Roy Baumeister define negativity bias as “the universal tendency for negative events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.” This tendency is strong. Research suggests a rule of four: it takes roughly four positive experiences to equal the weight we feel from a single negative one.
There are exceptions and outliers, of course – so not everyone, not all the time – but typically, negative experiences hit with about four times the force of positive. Critical feedback, for example, hits most of us harder than reinforcing feedback (or, to put it another way, we tend to discount positive messages because we imagine people are “just being nice”). Studies of risk assessment show that we focus more on potential losses than potential gains when making choices. When a change is announced, we find it easier to imagine the downsides than the upsides. Studies of the media show that even though most people say they would prefer to read less negative news and more positive, negatively framed news generates stronger responses and more clicks.
Because people notice your bad habits more than your good ones, changing those bad habits is four times more powerful.
Since people pay more attention to your negative examples than the positive, it is hard to be a good role model. Suppose you are trying to create more empowerment. Your people will watch you to see if you mean it, and if you really will change your behavior. But if your people are four times as likely to notice the times you relapse to old behaviors than to notice those times when you genuinely are more empowering, you need to be at 80% consistency before people even register that you are doing it half the time. That role-model math is daunting and feels unfair.
Once you understand the negativity bias, however, you can see an opportunity. Every time you stop a bad habit, it counts for four compared to starting some new positive behavior. The high-leverage move when trying to improve your leadership is to identify a pain point you create for others and to stop it. Let’s say one behavior you have that undermines empowerment is offering unsolicited advice to people who work for you. So, stop it! Changing bad habits is hard, but so is building good ones. The thing is that, because people notice your bad habits more than your good ones, changing those bad habits is four times more powerful.
Negativity bias shapes how we process feedback.
When it comes to giving and receiving feedback, our understanding of the negativity bias explains why the so-called “sandwich” model – the advice that you should give positive feedback, then negative, then positive again – doesn’t work. When you receive positive feedback from a sandwich leader, your mind shifts to anticipate the negative message to come next rather than listening to the feedback about what you are doing well so you can do more of it. Then you get negative feedback and are even less able to hear the repeated positive feedback that follows. All feedback should be given with positive intent, so let’s use the labels ‘reinforcing’ and ‘corrective’ feedback rather than positive and negative.
Reinforcing feedback needs space. Corrective feedback needs context.
This means that, if you want the positive message to land, put space between it and corrective feedback. “I was impressed with how you handled that customer today. They were being unreasonable. You listened and showed them respect while holding firm on our offer.” After offering that reinforcing feedback, make sure that whatever you say next doesn’t start with the word but. Resist the perverse tendency to imagine that right then is the perfect time to balance things out by giving some corrective feedback. “But you dominated our side of the negotiation and should have given your people more airtime to build their credibility in the customer’s eyes.” Save it. If you share that second bit of feedback now, it will drown out the positive. If you wait until tomorrow, the person will be able to hear and internalize both your reinforcing and corrective messages.
The negativity bias can lead us to exaggerate just how negative the feedback we receive is.
Suppose you tell me I dominated our side of the negotiation. I subconsciously multiply the strength of your words by four and hear that you see me as domineering and trying to steal the limelight. But that is neither what you say, nor what you mean. To prevent this misunderstanding, and to make sure your words are heard at the volume you intend, not louder, you may remind me how well I am doing overall and how effectively you see me leading my team (only, of course, if this is true) to help me set in context your specific feedback about my behavior in that meeting.
Negativity bias and our love of (resisting) change.
As human beings, we are hard-wired to explore, challenge ourselves, and seek change. There is a word in almost every language that describes how we feel when there is not enough change in our lives; when every day is just like the others. In English, that word is “bored.” We don’t like to feel bored. The only good thing about boredom is that it is so uncomfortable that it can prompt us to find creative ways to escape it.
Social psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues designed an ingenious experiment to show that many of us would rather experience pain than boredom. The experimenters left participants alone for 15 minutes in a lab room in which they could push a button and shock themselves if they wanted to. The results? 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict an electric shock on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think. So, why does it feel so obvious that people don’t want change? Most of the time we don’t expect people to say, “A new management structure? Great! I was bored with the old one.” So, what’s going on?
It is not change per se that we resist. It is the pain of change. And many, maybe most, changes in organizations have uncertain outcomes. You ask me to change, but I am not sure if the outcome will be good for me or the organization. And where there is uncertainty, what do we fill it with? Positive hopes? Well, some. But, also with four times as many negative expectations. That’s why we resist: it is easier for us to see how change might make things worse than how it might make things better.
What does this mean for us as leaders who are trying to create change? It means we shouldn’t be surprised by the negative reactions we get from our people. It means they are human, just like you. You need to give them some time, just like it probably took you some time to come to terms with the necessity of the change. If you try too hard to sell the benefits of the change right away, you are likely to be disappointed that people aren’t yet ready to hear you. Let them grieve; let them vent. Then you can come back after and talk about how you can make it work and what the positive aspects might be.
“Calibrate by talking to someone else to see if maybe you are being too negative. Who is someone that you trust to tell you the truth and who – and this is important – is not in the same situation as you?”
Why did our brains evolve to have a negativity bias in the first place? Probably for the same reason that we evolved to have other cognitive biases (confirmation bias, anchoring bias, status quo bias, etc.): hyperactive attentiveness to threat and danger provided some selection advantage in our evolutionary history. In a hostile environment, a bias for caution over curiosity can mean the difference between life and death. In the 21st century, though, we are well-advised to consciously correct how the negativity bias can warp our judgment, especially when we face complex, uncertain, and volatile situations. Now, let’s be clear, some ideas are terrible. Some changes are bad and should be resisted. We are not saying you should ignore or downplay negative events or find the silver lining in every gray cloud. We are not arguing for optimistically seeing every glass as half-full or adopting a positivity bias. We tend to see the negatives more easily, so we should be mindful of that to bring ourselves back to neutral.
Once you recognize the negativity bias in action in your mind, how do you counteract it? The first thing to recognize is that simply knowing the negativity bias exists does not make it go away. Like all cognitive biases, the negativity bias is automatic and pre-conscious. When we know about the negativity bias, we can consciously remind ourselves of what might be going on in our brain and override it. The problem, of course, is that, especially when the stakes are high, emotions are involved and this kind of cool, rational, conscious override of the negativity bias may not be available to us. What then? These three ways to switch focus are especially effective.
1. Reset your psychology by shifting your physiology
Researchers have identified that enjoying physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotions during moments of heightened stress by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels. So, whenever possible, go for a brisk walk, stand up against the wall or go for a run to burn off the pent-up energy, change your mindset, and come back with a clear head. Just make sure to choose a form of exercise you enjoy: if you hate jogging, jogging isn’t going to make you feel more positive.
What if you don’t have time to take an exercise break? Notice that, when you are in a negative state, your shoulders or back are more likely to tense, your voice changes pitch, volume, or speeds up and your breathing gets shallower. Reverse this by relaxing your shoulders, your face, and those parts of your body that feel contracted. Align your posture. Breathe out a bit slower and longer than usual.
2. Get another perspective by talking to others – or even to yourself
Calibrate by talking to someone else to see if maybe you are being too negative. Who is someone that you trust to tell you the truth and who – and this is important – is not in the same situation as you? People in the same situation will share your negativity bias. Talk to someone outside and get their perspective.
If you are aware of the way that the negativity bias affects you, then it can be enough just to change the way you are talking to yourself. If you sense that you may be overreacting to corrective feedback from your boss, call to mind reinforcing feedback and praise they have given you recently and recognize your instinct to discount the positive and trust the negative.
3. Switch focus with gratitude
Research shows that building simple habits of gratitude not only lessens the strength of the negativity bias but contributes to better mental health and well-being. Our brains are wired to take the good things in our lives for granted and focus on our problems. Stop and recall something that brings a smile to your face. It could be a memory, a person, or an aspect of your situation. Small or big? Magnify those good feelings by four.
Practicing gratitude is not hard, it’s just not natural. That’s the way negativity works – counteracting it is always possible, but never automatic. There is enough negativity in our lives without us needing to multiply it!
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