Switch - Chip Heath [18]
Those are 24 of the most common “emotion” words in English, and only 6 of them are positive! In a more exhaustive study, a psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words—every one that he could find in the English language—and found that 62 percent of them were negative versus 38 percent positive. That’s a pretty shocking discrepancy. According to an old urban legend, Eskimos have 100 different words for snow. Well, it turns out that negative emotions are our snow.
This negative focus is not confined to emotions. Across the board, we seem wired to focus on the negative. A group of psychologists reviewed over two hundred articles and concluded that, for a wide range of human behavior and perception, a general principle holds true: “Bad is stronger than good.”
Exhibit A: People who were shown photos of bad and good events spent longer viewing the bad ones.
Exhibit B: When people learn bad stuff about someone else, it’s stickier than good stuff. People pay closer attention to the bad stuff, reflect on it more, remember it longer, and weigh it more heavily in assessing the person overall. This pattern is so robust that researchers who study how we perceive one another have a label for it—“positive-negative asymmetry.”
Exhibit C: A researcher reviewed seventeen studies about how people interpret and explain events in their lives—for example, how sports fans interpret sporting events or how students describe their days in their journals. Across multiple domains—work and politics and sports and personal life—people were more likely to spontaneously bring up (and attempt to explain) negative events than positive ones.
We could present plenty more exhibits, but for now we’ll give the study’s authors the last (disappointed) word on the subject: “When we began this review we anticipated finding some exceptions that would demarcate the limits of the phenomenon … [but] we were unable to locate any significant spheres in which good was consistently stronger than bad” (emphasis added).
Bad is stronger than good. As Leslie Fiedler once said, lots of novelists have achieved their fame by focusing on marital problems, but there’s never been a successful novel about a happy marriage.
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A particular strain of this “bad is stronger than good” bias is critical when it comes to tackling change. Let’s call it a problem focus. To see it, consider this situation: Your child comes home one day with her report card. She got one A, four B’s, and one F. Where will you spend your time as a parent?
This hypothetical comes from author Marcus Buckingham, who says that nearly all parents will tend to fixate on the F. It’s easy to empathize with them: Something seems broken—we should fix it. Let’s get her a tutor. Or maybe she should be punished—she’s grounded until that grade recovers. It is the rare parent who would say, instead, “Honey, you made an ‘A’ in this one class. You must really have a strength in this subject. How can we build on that?” (Buckingham has a fine series of books on making the most of your strengths rather than obsessing about your weaknesses.)
When the Rider sees that things are going well, he doesn’t think much about them. But when things break, he snaps to attention and starts applying his problem-solving skills. So when your kids are making A’s and B’s, you don’t think much about their grades. But when they make a D or an F, you spring into action. It’s weird when you think about, isn’t it?
What if the Rider had a more positive orientation? Imagine a world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up. Imagine a world in which after a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she gave him a big kiss and said, “For thirteen of the last fourteen years you remembered my birthday! That’s wonderful!”
This is not our world.
But in times of change, it needs to be. Our Rider has a problem focus when he needs a solution focus. If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?”
We need to