In the face of good news, consider our head-scratching negativity:
- Soaring prosperity and souring assessments. In the last half-century, Americans have enjoyed more than doubled real incomes—and more than doubled per-person rates of so many things we enjoy—from cars to eating out, from home air conditioning to dishwashers, from color TV to channel and streaming options. A half-century ago, no one imagined laptops, smartphones, or even Post-it notes. And we had fewer human rights and a life expectancy 8 years briefer. Yet 58 percent of Americans responding to a Pew survey say “life in America” is worse today than 50 years ago; only 23 percent see it as better.
- A thriving economy perceived as worsening. More recently, the U.S. output of goods and services (the GDP) reached an all-time high, as has the stock market and people’s retirement accounts. Post-pandemic inflation has plummeted, with wage increases outpacing inflation. Unemployment is near a 50-year low. Yet recent surveys find that “51 percent wrongly believe that unemployment is nearing a 50-year high,” that 72 percent believe inflation is increasing, and that 57 percent agree “over the past two years . . . the economy has gotten worse.”
- Crime is down, but feels up. Since the early 1990s, the rates of violent and property crime—as collected by the FBI and confirmed in the National Crime Victimization Survey—have fallen by half to two-thirds. Yet year after year, 7 in 10 Americans tell Gallup they believe crime has increased in the past year.
- Immigrants are less crime-prone, yet seem more so. “The likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60 percent lower than of people born in the United States,” reports the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (confirming other reports). Yet 57 percent of Americans tell Pew “the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. is leading to more crime.” In words and images, Donald Trump’s demonization of immigrants reflects and fans this fearful negativity: “The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Immigrants would “walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
This negativity bias—the tendency for bad or threatening news and images to hijack our thinking and responding—extends to our everyday life. Perhaps you have noticed that:
Criticisms outweigh praise. At work and in our relationships, criticism captures more of our attention and emotions than does praise. Cruel words hurt us more than kind words please us. It takes multiple compliments to offset the hurt of one hostile student evaluation, for example, or of a co-worker’s single disparaging remark. A happy, stable marriage is said to require five or more positive acts and words to offset each negative exchange.
Negative acts dominate. A good reputation is more readily reversed with a single act of dishonesty or disloyalty than is a bad reputation by a single act of honesty or loyalty. Because negative information seems more diagnostic of character, voters are more responsive to negative information (and ads) than positive. Is it true of you? Is your voting driven more by intense opposition to the candidate you dislike than by intense support for the one you favor?
Bad is more potent than good. Bad events of our lives evoke more misery than good events evoke joy. Losing money pains us more than gaining equivalent money thrills us. Children’s miseries provoke more parental empathy and rumination than do their successes. Thus, many a parent is only as happy as their least happy child.
Negative words and news predominate. As psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues have noted, there are more negative emotion words than positive. When asked to think of emotion words, sadness, anger, and fear come to mind more quickly than words for positive emotions. In our daily news feeds, bad news prevails. The journalistic maxim: “We don’t cover planes that land.”
Negativity drives news consumption. One analysis found that across 105,000 news stories, each additional headline negative word “increased the click-through rate by 2.3 percent.” Moreover, lies and misinformation spread faster than truth. As satirist Jonathan Swift recognized in 1710, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes.”
Negativity bias isn’t the whole story. Unless depressed, people tend to be more positive—even excessively optimistic—about their own personal future. Students see themselves as more likely than their average classmate to progress to high educational attainment, to get a high-paying job, and to own a nice home. Adults see themselves as less vulnerable than others to future heart disease, cancer, or substance abuse.
And although only 18 percent of Americans said the national economy was good or excellent in a Federal Reserve survey, 73 percent said their own finances were doing okay or better. Likewise, while folks see crime as rampant and increasing in the nation, they see their own town and neighborhood as safe, healthy places. My part of America is fine, most think, while nevertheless often agreeing with Donald Trump that “our country is in decline, we are a failing nation.”
When psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert collected survey responses from 12.5 million people across 60 countries and 70 years, they found the same perception of societal decline. People everywhere report no change in their own moral behaviors, yet see morality (kindness, honesty, etc.) in decline, even as the world has become more humane—with subsiding war, murder, child abuse, and slavery.
There is biological wisdom beneath this pervasive negative bias. Our sensitivity to threats served our ancestors. Those who interpreted the sound of a cracking twig as a predator rather than the wind left more descendants.
Moreover, negative happenings often are accompanied by visual images, which can overwhelm more representative data like facts and statistics. Vivid anecdotes often eclipse facts and statistics. Images of murderous immigrants, crashing planes, and starving children seize our attention, get remembered, touch our hearts, and sway our judgments. Small wonder that while the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has plummeted by two-thirds since 1990, 87 percent of folks surveyed across 24 countries believe global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse. To see is to believe.
So, given our attunement to negative news in a world awash in negative news, how might we restrain our natural negativity? How can we steer our minds between starry-eyed personal optimism that denies real threats (“People are basically good; everything will work out”) and societal dark despair (“It’s hopeless; why bother trying?”). How can we balance enough realism to fuel concern with enough optimism to provide hope? Here are four suggestions:
- Attend also to good news. We can expose ourselves not only to the world’s horrors but to its encouraging news. My recommendation: Subscribe to the weekly “Fix the News” email that identifies worldwide good news about human flourishing and environmental progress.
- Keep criticisms and bad news in perspective. In our house, when hit by bad news, we ask ourselves, “Will children die?” That’s our way of asking whether it’s that big a deal. I also remind myself that my response to today’s bad news will likely have a short half-life. People recover more quickly than they expect. As the late psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman observed in Thinking Fast and Slow, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”
- Count your blessings. Pause to be mindful of the positive people and events in your life. An old Gospel hymn had the idea (albeit overstated):
Are you ever burdened with a load of care?
Does the cross seem heavy you are called to bear?
Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly,
And you will keep singing as the days go by.
4. Think smart. News of a “healthy doctor” dying two weeks after a Covid shot (never mind that 8,000+ people die daily) fed anti-vax fears that contributed to a reported 234,000 needless Covid deaths. But we can think smarter. When a grim anecdote, photo, or video alarms you, pause to reflect: “Yes, that school shooting, that immigrant murder, that shoplifting spree, that police brutality was a terrible happening. But how representative is it? Show me the data—data that represent not isolated stories but countless people’s stories.”
As we process the barrage of negative news and “failing nation” rhetoric, our great challenge is to base our politics and lives on facts rather than fears, on data rather than doom. Better an informed optimism than a naive negativity.
(David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.)
11/13/24 P.S. Some Reuters/Ipsos pre-election survey insights:
