Why is everything so bad?

And is it partly your fault?

Right, let’s try something different.

I want you to cast your mind back, if you can, to your best year. Your heyday, the time of your life, when it was bliss to be alive. Remember how it felt, where you were, what made the year such a good one. Sit with that memory for a few moments. Nice.

Now take a breath and recall the worst year you ever had. Remember how and why things were bad, how you felt, where you were, what it was that ruined the year.

OK. So then, which evoked stronger emotion? The good old days or the annus horribilis?

I’m willing to bet that for most of you, remembering the bad was more visceral, more powerful, than the good. If that wasn’t the case for you, then do let us know in the comments.

The thing is, bad is usually much stronger than good. Or, to coin a word that none of us use much, more salient. It hits harder, feels more.

Winning is nice, but losing is nastier. Getting a job can be exciting. Losing one can be devastating. Bad parents, colleagues, weather have greater impact than their good counterparts. Praise gives us a lift, but will be forgotten if there is a single word of criticism: it is the bad feedback that we will fixate on.

There are sound evolutionary reasons for this: creatures that consider threats more salient than opportunities have a greater chance of surviving.

But this does leave us with a prodigious negativity bias in human psychology - and the wider world. It affects everything from international relations to journalism, sport to business. It starts from a very young age.¹

And unfortunately, if left to its own devices, it can have a dismal effect on our mental health.

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Roy Baumeister does not strike me as a negative person. When I asked for an interview for this article, he did not say no.

Baumeister is an American social psychologist and something of an expert in negativity who is currently attached to a university in Germany. (I was really hoping it would be in Bad-en Bad-en, but he is in fact Mercator Scholar at Constructor University in Bremen).

His book The Power of Bad (written with John Tierney) is an all-encompassing study of where negativity bias comes from and how it brings us down.

I ask first where this glass-half-empty tendency comes from. He says that his original research plan was to examine where negativity bias was found and where it wasn’t, so his team could deduce what caused it. But they found no exceptions. It was universal, a basic property of the mind.

“The best guess then is that it is something shaped by evolution,” Baumeister says. “As I like to say, life has to win every day, but death only has to win once. To sustain life, the top priority is avoiding bad things, rather than capitalising on good ones.”

We see this around us every day, everywhere.

Just look at those graphs of financial markets that have dominated the news this week. See how the good runs take time to build slowly - but the bad stuff eradicates all those gains in a trice. It’s the same with reputation - it takes years to build but can be destroyed in moments. A single mistake can ruin a career. An article like this can be ruined by a bad error, or a terrible sentence like this:

Banana whispers loudly under the sofa where some big horse done a puffer.

The FTSE-100 index over the past 15 years. Slowly up, quickly down. Source: London Stock Exchange

Politics is no different.² Negativity bias can make political actors more attuned to perceived threats from adversaries than potential opportunities.

Trump’s tariffs are a good example of this - overindexing threat and choosing a zero-sum game in a realm where win-win has proven perfectly possible in trading relations over the decades. It also explains why conflicts are easy to start (political actors overestimate the threat from adversaries) and hard to stop (confidence and trust are much harder to build than suspicion and antagonism).

Baumeister says business and commerce are also vulnerable to negativity bias. “One bad apple can undermine a team’s effectiveness,” he says. “In contrast, a bad team is not usually saved or redeemed by adding a single good worker.” It’s the same with product reviews: a good one is helpful, but a bad review can be terminal. “To succeed, therefore, businesses have to avoid or minimise any negative reviews, which may include conceding to absurd complaints,” he adds.

In sports too, negativity bias and loss aversion tend to dominate tactics. Sports stars love to win, but they hate losing more. Which is not surprising given that a win is often just incremental, but defeat is often the end of the road. In music, one bum note can spoil an entire tune. Pity bass guitar players and goalkeepers. We only notice them when they get it wrong.

Of course, the news doesn’t help. Journalists learn about negativity bias early, discovering that bad news is stronger, more salient, more powerful - and more clickable - than good news. (It’s also far easier to write). I worked in the news business for more than 30 years, and if I learned one thing it’s that two negatives don’t make a positive - they make a front-page story. Whatever readers say about being tired of bad news, they are still more likely to click on articles with apocalyptic headlines than articles that wonder where did it all go right.

And yet at the same time, there is no shortage of research that finds that all this bad news is bringing us down. ³ ⁴ ⁵

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The impact of all of this on our mental health is incalculable. Awash in news misery and steeped in the natural negativity bias of our own instincts, we dice with an overly pessimistic view both of the world and our place in it.

Whether rich or poor, old or young, sick or well, negativity bias means that we tend to dwell on what is wrong, not what is right, to focus on what we haven’t got and not what we have.

But Baumeister says do not despair. The very fact that you are aware of your negativity bias is a big step towards overcoming it.

“Knowing that you have a bias is already one big step toward not being fooled by it,” he says. “And its effects are not entirely negative. Negativity stimulates more thinking and careful analysis.”

Baumeister says that though there are many bad things in the world, there is a lot more good. “Good often prevails by force of numbers,” he says. “A great many good things can offset the few bad ones.”

“Cultivate the good. After all, life in Western Europe and North America is mostly good. We encourage people to look for positive things.”

What does that look like? It goes back to my previous post on where you focus your attention. Allow it to succumb to the natural instinct for negativity and doom-mongery and you risk falling into the rumination and despair that can be precursors to more serious mental upset.

At the same time, there is no point pretending that bad things are good, or putting heads in sand and ignoring problems.

My approach is threefold: to catch the negativity as it arises, observe it, avoid ruminating on it; secondly, to seek out some good things that I’ve failed to notice - an old photo, a new plant, some nice feedback from a reader.

And finally to understand that a lot of negativity is really only a product of the mind, of thinking.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Until next week

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/#S4

2. https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1688&context=fac-poli-sci

3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10410236.2022.2106086

4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8096381/

5. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjop.12389