What is Negativity Bias?

One of the keys to polarization can be found in our subconscious

Negativity bias is one of a multitude of cognitive biases that humans almost universally suffer from due to millions of years of evolutionary history. Negativity bias describes the tendency to give more psychological weight to things of a more negative nature than to positive or neutral things of the same magnitude. Said another way, human beings typically care more about and pay more attention to negative events than positive events.

This isn’t to say that humans enjoy or seek negativity at the expense of positivity. On the contrary, most humans seek pleasure over pain. Instead, negativity bias dictates that given the choice between a negative event and a positive event, we’ll pay more attention to the negative event, not because we enjoy it more but because we fundamentally view it as more important and attention-worthy.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this bias makes a lot of sense. It has always been more important for humans to focus more on negative news than positive news. In prehistory, negative news was literally the difference between life and death, whereas positive news was generally just the difference between life and a slightly happier life.

When a band of foragers would see a lion or a rival band of foragers, for example, it was of the utmost importance to spread that negative news to everyone else as quickly as possible. Not doing so would risk annihilation. Because of the annihilation risk associated with negative news, human beings developed a negativity bias to “overreact” to negative stimuli and thus stand a better chance of survival.

As with the other cognitive biases, the original utility of negativity bias has waned as our environment has changed over the past two millennia. Today, this bias is largely seen as an irrational tendency to value negative stimuli over positive stimuli, which is why negativity bias is grouped together with the other cognitive biases.

In recent decades, negativity bias has been studied in detail, and a mountain of academic research has been produced in a multitude of fields on this effect and its many derivative concepts. Negativity bias has conceptual offshoots occurring in fields as diverse as psychology, economics, finance, sociology, neuroscience, literature, history, and linguistics.

In behavioral economics and financial psychology, David Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 partly for his work with Amos Tversky on prospect theory and loss aversion, two concepts that are highly related to negativity bias. In a nutshell, prospect theory is a behavioral economics theory that stems from loss aversion, which is the tendency for humans to prefer avoiding financial losses to acquiring equivalent gains. Some of Kahneman and Tversky’s studies have shown that losses are, psychologically, twice as powerful as gains, and this propensity to assign more psychological weight to losses than gains is a clear parallel to negativity bias.

Neurologically, negativity bias has also been shown to have interesting and repeatable effects. Multiple studies using neuroimaging technology have shown that brain activity is increased by negative events more than by positive events (Ito, Larsen, Smith, Cacioppo – 1998). Likewise, more attention and processing power is devoted by the brain to negative stimuli than to positive stimuli.

The effect has also been studied in memory formation and learning, in which multiple studies (Grossmann, Woodward – 2008 and Hamlin, Baron – 2014) have shown that memories form more quickly and more durably for negative events than for positive events.

Even within linguistics, studies have shown that negative concepts are described by a larger and more varied array of words than positive concepts are due to a concept called negative differentiation (Rozin and Royzman – 2001). Other concepts related to negativity bias include negative potency, negativity gradients, and negativity dominance, all of which in one way or another describe the overwhelming power that negativity has over positivity in the human psyche.

Looking at these derivative effects from a high-level, it’s easy to see that negativity bias is a major cognitive bias that can have an outsized impact on the way human beings view the world.

Unfortunately, negativity bias tends to get lumped in with the broader family of cognitive biases, and its individual contribution to our warped perception of the world is rarely acknowledged by popular talking points.

By talking about negativity bias more frequently and specifically, the importance of this bias and its impact on consumer preferences in the media and political marketplaces can begin to be better understood by the public.