We are naturally negative: Negativity Bias

 

We are naturally negative: Negativity Bias   

 

Image: Pixabay

The Negative Default: Part 1

“People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So, the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.”

--Eckhart Tolle – self-help author

 

Negative bias is the natural human default. Negative thoughts are a reflex action, our initial response to new or unfamiliar ideas, facts, people, and situations. Along with our own private histories and memories of experience that activate and re-run our natural warning system against danger, this is our natural reflex.

Survival

Most people tend to focus their attention on what is wrong, not on what is going well.

An example is Artificial Intelligence and its negative responses in the media. Reports on the pitfalls and insufficiencies are about two-to-one alarmist rather than appreciative. The same alarm is raised for any innovative technology that promises improvement in process or outcome, such as weaving machines or standardized gun manufacturing. The public reacts to the prospect of loss (jobs) before the miracle of improvements in working and living standards (new capabilities).  With AI, its unproven track record or future impact, along with the pitfalls and insufficiencies, are the expected headlines.  In parallel are the politically sensitive debates on the negative impact of data centers. 

This makes the power of positive thinking a course of trained behavior, since it is opposite the natural untrained reaction. Quoting Dale Carnegie on positive thinking: “It isn’t what you have, or who you are. or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. If we think happy thoughts, we will be happy. If we think miserable thoughts….” You can fill in the blank.

Happiness experts constantly point to the mind’s power to combat negative thoughts and events by transforming or ignoring them…but without the awareness that this exercise is an uphill fight against our evolved survival skills based on attending foremost and first to danger and threat.  Erik Wahl in his book Unthink (2013), put it this way: 

We all love mystery, just in other people’s stories.  It’s a different story when the mystery involves us.  Suddenly the unknown is not nearly as appealing.  Suddenly the unknown becomes frightful.  We do not wonder what greater potential lies ahead; we wonder what peril lies ahead.  This is your left brain crying out (p. 154).

On the face of the planet, among other animals, humans are the most invasive species, displacing other species in every geographical niche. Our most feared predator is not the crocodile or even (my favorite) the Komodo dragon. Most of us will never meet such creatures in our lifetime. It is other people who are the animals that occupy our fear zone.

Humans, that is other humans, are also our own most feared predator. Mosquitos kill more humans than anything else – through disease transport like malaria – yet we usually register them as annoying rather than dangerous until the illness is running rampant.

Thanks to our native intelligence, adaptive thinking, planning, and collective action we are the apex predator and dominant species in every earth environment. For the record, from Our world in Data, homicides worldwide are 600,000. Man’s best friends kill 40,000, mostly by rabies.  Mosquitos kill up to one million people in an average year, the top number. Further down the list are snakes at 100,000.  Sharks, more scary but far less lethal, kill just five to ten people in a year, out of 70-100 total attacks.  This number gets far more ink than the mosquitoes.  We just find sharks far more fear-inspiring.