Jarom Gibbons

Why Humans Tend to Focus More on Negative Bias than Positive Bias

Global Context - Identities And Relationships

Goal - To earn and understand why humans tend to focus and cling on negative things more than the positive things around us.

Introduction

I want to use the steps scientific method to create a survey based of the research and information that I find and analyse the results to inform others why We Humans remember Negative comments, articles, feedback etc. Better than we do the positive.

With this goal I had a question in mind, “How much do I focus on the negative bias?” And reflecting on myself I realized, quite a bit actually. I often better remember the Feedback on parts of a project or paper where there were suggestions on what I could have done a little better than all of the other parts that I had done well on said project. With this in mind in wanted to learn the reasons why.

The reason why humans are more prone to remember negativity

The official term for why negative events have a greater impact on our brains is known as Negative Bias. Negative bias is not only the human tendency to register negative stimuli more readily but also to fixate and dwell on certain events that cause negative stimuli. In short it means we have much stronger feelings towards representation or rebuke than we feel the joy of praise and approval. The brain shows that when it is responding to specific sensory, cognitive or, motor stimuli have shown that the brain elicits a larger brain response to negative stimuli than positive stimuli does.

The fact is humans tendency to pay more attention to negative things and overlook good and positive things is actually most likely a result of evolution. For example in early human history people who paid attention to dangerous, bad and negative threats around them was quite literally a matter of life and death. Those who were better attuned to danger and paid more attention to their surroundings where more likely to survive. This meant that those who were more attuned to danger where much more likely to pass down genes to the next generation that made them more attentive to danger. So basically its due to natural selection.

Example of a positive title

My Hypothesis

I Hypothesized that the titles that appealed to the negative bias would be remembered more than the positive bias. Also that negative titles would also genially have a larger reaction response than the positive titles and here are the results.

My Project

To test my topic I decided that I was going to create a survey that contained 10 different Titles with an image from things like videos and news articles, each would either target a negative bias or a positive bias, I then asked the participants to describe their initial reaction to each Title based off how they felt towards the picture and the description. After each of the 10 different titles had been reacted to I asked the participants to take a 15 minute break before responding to the last two questions. Those questions where which title they remembered the most after the 15 minutes, and in their opinion why they remember that title the most. I specifically picked negative articles and the main picture that was shown on the picture that I believed would have a more profound reaction on the participants in which they would be more likely to remember than the positive counter parts.

Example of a negative title

Briefly: What is your initial reaction to this article based off the title and image?

Results

The results were pretty much what I had hypothesized, to provide a little context titles 10,4 and 1 where meant to be focus on negative bias and titles 5 and 6 where focusing on the positive bias. From the results we can see that majority of the participants remembered a negative tittles. Also the longer reaction responses towards the titles tended to be longer when describing ones that revolved around negative bias. The projects main purpose was to test whether negative bias was indeed remembered better than positive bias based of a title with an image without much context being given except that which was provided through the title and then analysing the results to see whether or not my hypothesis was correct or incorrect.

Longest response to a negative title

Longest response to a positive title

Conclusion

In conclusion my hypothesis was correct, form the data of the graph we can see the that negative titles where genuinely better remembered than the positive ones. As expected most of the participants had a stronger brain response towards the negative stimuli they got from reading negative titles. Because we live in a modern age weather or not we remember every negative thing does not mean we will end up in a life or death situation, however the negative bias can have a powerful impact on our behaviour, however being aware of this means we can beguine taking steps towards a more positive overlook on life. To take a more mindful approach will require being aware of our own tendency towards negativity. Consciously and continually elevating happier thoughts to the front of our awareness will be one of our best ways to combat the negative bias in our lives.