SYSK TRENDING - How the Negativity Effect Rules Us

0:00I thought I had a pretty good idea of where my money was going, and then I started using Monarch. And it turns out there's a big difference between thinking you know and actually seeing it all laid out in front of you. I've spent some time with Monarch now. I've connected everything and really tested it out, and I like it a lot. Your accounts, investments, savings goals, spending, they're all there in one place. But what really got my attention is Monarch doesn't just show you what's happened. It helps you spot what's happening right now. They have an AI Weekly Recap, and it can flag a spending spike or a change in your net worth or upcoming expenses.

0:43Things that are surprisingly easy to miss on your own. And I found that once you actually see the numbers, you look at your money differently. If you've ever wondered, where exactly is all my money going? I think you'll find Monarch pretty eye-opening. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SYSK at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code SYSK. Suppose 10 people tell you how great you look today, and one person says, you look tired. Which comment are you going to remember tonight? Probably the bad one.

1:33There's actually a reason for that. It's called the negativity effect, our tendency to give bad experiences, bad news, and criticism more weight than equally positive things. And it can influence everything from your relationships and career to what you buy, what you worry about, and how you see the world. That's why today's SYSK trending topic is how the negativity effect rules us. So why does your brain seem so determined to focus on what's wrong? John Tierney is a science journalist, and in my conversation with him, he explains why bad is so powerful and how understanding that can help you keep negativity from running your life.

2:16And we'll be back with that insight right after this. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear, and my wife and son buy from Quince, too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price. Quince uses premium materials like 100 % Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, merino wool. Their cashmere sweaters start at just$60.

3:02And with colder weather coming, they have down jackets and classic wool outerwear as well. Quince prices everything 50 to 80 % less than similar brands by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out the middlemen. And it's not just clothes. They have bedding, bath, kitchen essentials, and furniture. We even have Quince pillows. So this isn't one of those endorsements where I try something once because they sent it to me. We shop at Quince, and I absolutely recommend you try it. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com.

3:41Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was something you should know. It's the best way to support our show.

4:00You've probably heard of something called negativity bias or the negativity effect, which is basically that we tend to pay attention to and are more motivated by negative things than by positive things. That it hurts more to lose$10 than it feels good to get$10. And it seems to be human nature, but there's so much more to it than that. And understanding how the negativity effect works and how you can use it in a positive way is really interesting. John Tierney is a writer who, along with social psychologist Roy Baumeister, has researched and written a book called The Power of Bad, How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.

4:46Hi, John. Welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for inviting me. So since you're the expert and you wrote the book on it, explain The Power of Bad. Well, The Power of Bad is the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and bad emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. You know, when you hear a mix of compliments and criticism, you obsess over the criticism instead of enjoying the praise. You know, when you walk into a room and you see a bunch of faces, you focus on the hostile one and you miss all the smiles. And, you know, and this negativity effect, it just skews the way we see the world.

5:23It skews our decisions and our relationship. Isn't it true? I mean, so our podcast has hundreds and hundreds of reviews on Apple podcasts and all that, and most of them are glowing. Most of them are great. People love this podcast. But guess which ones I take particular notice of? And the ones you can't forget. It's just the same thing that happened, you know, the power of bad when the reviews came out. You know, they've been generally very good, but it's the one sentence here, the one, you know, cranky guy who posts a review who you think never really actually read the book. There must be a reason why we do this, why we're so drawn to the negative.

6:03And I imagine it has something to do with our survival as a species or some sort of evolutionary thing. Right. It's adaptive, as evolutionary biologists call it, that it helped our ancestors survive because it was much more important to pay attention to threats like a hungry lion than it was to savor the good things. You really had to pay attention not to eat poisonous berries instead of enjoying the great meals. And it's more important to pay attention to an enemy who might kill you or might ruin your life in some way than to be nice to a friend because a friend can't do that much good for you, whereas an enemy can really do bad stuff.

6:44So, you know, to survive, life has to win every day. Death only has to win once. So the brain is just primed to look out for those threats. And it's still useful. I mean, it's still important to pay attention to bad stuff. And we learn more from bad stuff. So it's a great teaching and motivational tool. But the problem, as we argue, is that there's, And we're in this high, bad environment now where we're just surrounded by people, the merchants of bad, as we call them, who are trying to scare us, who are trying to get our attention. And they know the easiest way to get our attention, whether on television, on a smartphone app, on anything, on social media, the easiest way to get your attention is with something bad because the brain immediately pays attention.

7:27Well, and you've been a journalist, so you know the old saying that if it bleeds, it leads, because people are drawn to the violent, to the bloody, to the bad. You know, and I found myself guilty of this throughout my career. It's how I got interested. When I noticed myself early, I was a summer intern, and I found myself ridiculously hyping this weather story to make it sound like, you know, Armageddon. And I just wonder, why am I doing this and why do readers want to see all this bad news? And the answer for mass media is that it's just the easiest way to get attention. The good news today is that, you know, podcasts like yours are, you know, that's a whole different form now.

8:09And social media tends to be more positive than mass media. I mean, we hear about the Twitter wars. You know, there's an awful lot of vitriol on social media, but there's much more positivity. You know, people tend to share positive things more than negative things. When you tweet positively, you actually get more followers than people who tweet negatively. And, you know, I mean, you know, these new outlets like, you know, podcasts like this, it gives people a chance to listen for an extended time to something that really interests them, you know, some positive thing that interests them. So knowing that this is very pervasive, it's basically human nature, how do we use it in a positive way when it is in itself not?

8:53You can put bad moments to good use. You know, that instead of despairing at a setback, you know, override your gut reaction and look for a useful lesson. You know, the upside of the negativity effect is its power to teach and to motivate. Penalties are usually more effective than rewards at spurring students and workers to improve. They've done clever experiments watching how kids learn. If you give them a marble for a right answer, you take a marble away for the wrong one. Taking the marble away, the penalty, they learn much faster that way. Religions that emphasize hell tend to grow much more quickly.

9:31They fill the pews on Sunday more than ones that are very benevolent. And there's even evidence that in countries where more people believe in hell, there's a lower crime rate. It's more of a deterrent. And one of the problems that we see in today's education system is that we've gone to this everybody gets a trophy philosophy. And as a result, students are learning less. There's been rampant grade inflation. So the average grade at college now is an A minus. So students are learning less than in the past. and it's because we're not using penalties well enough. I mean, you want to do both. You want to reward people for good work, but you don't want to just do this, everybody gets a trophy when they don't do good work.

10:11But there is a general consensus among people, not necessarily you and people that study this, but I think there's a general consensus in the population that positive reinforcement is better than negative feedback. I mean, there's two reasons why we have that idea. One is the self-esteem movement, from the 1970s and 80s, which is one of the sorrier mistakes in the history of psychology. My co-author, Roy Baumeister, who's one of the leading social psychologists, he started his career in that self-esteem research and thought it looked very promising because people saw that kids with high self-esteem do well, and they thought that's what caused it.

10:53In fact, what Roy and others found out was that, no, that's not how it works, that yes, people who are successful have high self-esteem, but the causation is, they have high self-esteem because they're successful. Just having high self-esteem doesn't help you. So that's one of the reasons. The other reason, and this whole idea that the carrot is more effective than the stick, we trace the history of that cliche. It goes back to the 19th century when there were cartoons and people would advise parents that it's more effective to use a carrot than a stick. And they would tell this fable about that's how you got a donkey to move better was to put a carrot there instead of using a stick.

11:31And the question we ask is, has anyone ever seen a donkey move that way? I mean, you know, when you look at the horses in the winner's circle of the Kentucky Derby, you don't see any carrots dangling there. You know, the jockeys have whips. And our conclusion is that the reason we think that encouragement works better is because it's a lot more pleasant to give encouragement than it is to criticize. You know, people would rather say nice things. It's a lot less stressful when you evaluate someone just to tell them lots of nice things and let it go at that. So it's more pleasant to give praise, but it's much more effective to give a mix of both, because the criticism is really where people learn.

12:09One of the things people struggle with is, what is that mix? What is too much and what is not enough? Well, we talk about the rule of four, and that is that, and this is based on a lot of different research into how people respond to financial gains and losses, you know researchers who study how many good days someone has versus how many bad days how many good emotions versus how many bad emotions to see what seems to work and the general rule is that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad thing that's the rule of four as we call it and you know and it's a useful rule of thumb it means that if you're late for one meeting you're not going to make up for it by being early the next time.

12:56If you say one hurtful thing, you need to say at least four good things to make up for that. And one of the unfortunate things has been this idea of the criticism sandwich, where you start out with lots of good things for the person, then you slip in a little criticism, and then you say a few nice things, and that's it. The problem is, if you say all the good stuff first, and then you say the criticism, the criticism just hits the brain so hard that it forgets all the stuff that came before. And so the person walks out of the meeting, all they can think of is the bad stuff, and they've forgotten all the good stuff.

13:30So our advice is to get the criticism done early, and then the brain's on high alert, and then you say the praise. And try to say more than four bits of praise for every bit of criticism. and, you know, and give the criticism, and you can do it in a positive way, saying, you know, this didn't work last year, but here's a way that we're going to, you know, deal with it next year, and things are going to be better than ever. You know, so you don't want the person walking out demoralized, but you've got to make sure that they hear what's gone wrong so they can improve. We're talking about the negativity bias, the negativity effect, and my guest is John Tierney, who is co-author of the book The Power of Bad, how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it.

14:16A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted. Listing is quick and simple. And when an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And importantly, there are no seller fees on Vinted.

15:00So when you sell something, you keep everything you earn. I like this whole idea because instead of clothes just taking up space, somebody else gets to wear them and you get some money out of the deal. Your closet looks better too. I mean, everybody wins, even the closet. So maybe it's time to stop waiting for someday. Download the Vinted app for free and start listing with no seller fees so you keep everything you earn. Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you.

15:45Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See Experian.com for details. So, John, one of the things, in fact, I just recently spoke with someone about relationships, and they said, well, constructive criticism is still criticism, and that you're better off, at least in a personal relationship like a marriage, to shine a light on the positive things people do and ignore the bad ones, because by praising the good things, they'll do more of them.

16:29that's true i was speaking there about when you're a teacher or you're a supervisor who's evaluating someone and your job is to get them to improve so in that sense you've got to do the criticism in personal relationships you also when there's something wrong when there's something really seriously wrong you have to talk about it but in general in relationships it's great the more you can tamp down the negativity and stress the positivity the better it is you know we pride ourselves on the many good things we do for our family and our friends for going the extra mile. But what really matters is what we don't do.

17:04You know, avoiding bad is far more important than doing good. You get relatively little credit for doing more than you promised, but you pay a big price if you fall short of a promise. And researchers who've tracked couples over time to which marriages survive and which ones don't, they find that it depends mainly on how spouses deal with negativity. You want to avoid saying hurtful things. You want to avoid doing hurtful things. And you also want to give your partner a break. In really successful marriages, people maintain what researchers call positive illusions. In fact, there's some great brain scanning experiments where the part of their brain that makes negative judgments shuts down when they look at a picture of their partner.

17:50They've learned how to do this. And the great thing is when you have these positive illusions about your partner, they eventually start believing them too. They have an unrealistically high. And it works for both of you. So, I mean, it is really important to avoid needless negative things, to give your partner the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong, to don't assume that because they did something that bothers you that they were selfish or that they were trying to hurt you. Assume that there might have been some other reason for it. Look for that other reason. And also, really capitalize on the good moments.

18:27Researchers use this term capitalization to talk about how you can put those good moments and those good comments and good thoughts to use. One of the simplest techniques, and since I did a study of this research, I try to do it every day, is that when someone, when you have good news, share it with someone because sharing it makes it much more powerful. And when you hear someone's good news, don't just sit there quietly nodding. You know, you should do something like say, that's great. Ask some questions about it, talk about it. It makes the trying more significant. It makes both of you feel better, makes you feel closer.

19:07And it really does magnify the joy. You know, there's a great aphorism from Mark Twain from Puddinghead Wilson where he says, to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. And that's crucial to do in a relationship. It almost seems that today, the idea of penalizing or punishing someone for something they've done wrong or they've not performed well, that penalizing them for it is almost archaic, and that the enlightened approach in some circles is to praise the positive and ignore the negative when what you're clearly saying is to just praise the positive is a fairly weak way to motivate people's behavior or performance.

19:57Penalizing does work. I mean, it works with workers, and there have been experiments with teachers who either get bonuses if their kids do well or they get paid docked from them if the kids don't do well. And, you know, the threat of that penalty is enough to really motivate the teachers to do better. And students are the same way. So I think, again, we don't want to go back to corporal punishment, but we do think there should be some kind of penalty mixed with rewards. I know you talk about the power of getting other people's view on what's wrong with your life. because just as we can see more objectively other people's problems, other people can see more objectively what's going on in our lives because we're just too close to it.

20:47In The Power of Bad, we have the story from a novel by Anthony Trollope about this marriage that fell apart for absolutely no reason. The husband and wife, nothing bad happened really, but they both just kept antagonizing the other one, and it just built up and built up. And, you know, early in the novel, when the wife is upset about something the husband said, her sister offers the best piece of advice in the novel, as we say, it's, if I were you, I would forget it. And in that sense, relying on someone else to make a judgment for you, going to them, because they don't feel personally threatened.

21:25They don't feel personally affronted by it. There are interesting experiments when they ask people to gamble in laboratories that when they ask you to decide how I should bet, you will make much more rational decisions than I will because you're not personally involved in that. You don't personally feel that sense of loss. And so you can be much more rational about it. Football coaches are just incredibly irrational. and we see this every Sunday where they keep punting on fourth down when all the odds, all the statisticians tell them you should go for it, that you'll score a lot more points in the long run if you go for it on fourth and short, almost anywhere on the field, beyond your own 10 or 20-yard line.

22:06It really makes sense to go for it. And yet the coaches are so afraid of that failure. What if we don't make it? It'll be on the highlights reel. People will blame me for the loss. And they just keep punting instead of it. And we tell the story of one high school football coach in Arkansas who he trained himself to overcome that negativity bias by he said, I'm going to I'm not going to go with my gut. I'm going to pay attention to the statistics and the way I'm going to avoid being swayed by my emotions in the moment is I'm going to make a rule beforehand. These are the only situations in which I will punt.

22:42And otherwise, I automatically go for it. And his team punts once a season. And they have won the state championship year after year. You know, they score 50 points a game. They always go for it. Even if he's on his own one-yard line, he goes for it. Isn't that interesting when the statistics, the facts, fly in the face of punting on fourth down, and yet everybody does it? And it's amazing. I mean, you watch the games on television, and the commentators are the worst of all. They're, oh, my God, he's going for it, you know, on fourth and one on the 50-yard line. I mean, it's ridiculous to punt in that situation.

23:20You know, you're going to gain maybe 30 or 40 yards, but you're giving up the chance to score. And that is so much more valuable. This negativity bias, the negativity effect where we tend to notice more the negative things in our life, seems to not only apply to individual lives, but also in a broader sense, in that people seem to think that the world is getting worse. And yet, objectively, from what I've read, things are actually getting better in almost every area of life. The better life gets, you know, the more assiduously we look for bad things. And, you know, there's an old saying, no food, one problem.

24:06Much food, many problems. We suddenly invent these first world problems. And, you know, it's very sad to me because virtually every measure of human well-being is improving around the world. It's amazing how much better off we are than our ancestors. We're the luckiest people in history. We live longer. We're healthier. We're wealthier. We're better educated. And yet, when you ask people how things are going, are things going to keep getting better? If you go to developing countries where they can see this progress right away, they're optimistic. But in rich countries like the United States and in Europe, people are more pessimistic because they're so swayed by this negativity effect by seeing bad news all the time that they don't realize how much better life is getting for everyone.

24:55Well, it would seem that just being aware of this, being aware of the tendency to focus on the negative can really help you shake loose of it because you're on guard for it. I try to not read all the news because I know how much my fellow journalists hype things. And I look for, you know, the big question I ask when you hear about some new awful trend is, or about some new awful problem is, what's the trend? I mean, there's always going to be problems in the world. There will always be some people who are doing worse in some ways. But what's the long-range trend? Are things getting better or worse in this case?

25:36And what you find over and over again is that over the long haul, things are getting better. There are blips sometimes and some people suffer. But on the whole, things are getting better and we solve these problems. You know, when something comes along, we come up with a solution that typically ends up leaving us better off in the long run. When the dust settles from all of this, what's the takeaway? What's the message here? We want people to realize that there is much more good in the world than bad. and that there's much more to celebrate than to mourn. And again, we want people to know how to exploit the power of bad when it's useful.

26:15It's a great way to learn. You learn more from failure than from success. And instead of being devastated by a setback, we want people to learn how to look for the lessons from it. But above all, we want people to overcome the negativity effect, to see how much is going right in the world and how much can be going right in their lives, and to be optimistic about the future. Things really are getting better. Well, it's a good message. People would remember it better if it was a bad message, but I'm glad it's a good message. John Tierney has been my guest. He and his co-author Roy Baumeister have written a book called The Power of Bad, how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it.

27:02And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, John. Thank you very much, Mike. And that's it for today's SYSK Trending episode. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.