Negativity Bias - Examples

Examples

• Researchers have found that children and adults have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories. Adults and children can recall the detailed descriptions of unpleasant behaviors compared with positive memories. As humans, we learn faster when we have negative reinforcement.

• Negativity plays a key role in maintaining a healthy marriage. Couples who participate in both negative and positive interactions remain together; however, the interactions should not be 50-50. Since the brain weighs negative situations and experiences heavier than positive, the ratio in marriages must be five-to-one. Couples must engage in five times as many positive experiences as negative experiences.

• Almost everyone has pleasant experiences with dogs throughout their life; however if someone has one experience with a dog attacking or biting him, then they will most likely be scared of dogs and rely more heavily on the unpleasant experience than the many pleasant experiences.

• The use of social media for large organizations demonstrates the negativity bias. McDonalds used Twitter to get customers to tell their favorite stories of their experiences with the restaurant (#McFail). Out of the 79,000 tweets about McDonalds, 2,000 were negative. Even though there were more positive tweets overall, most of the headlines focused on the failure of the campaign.

• Managers that do not give any new opportunities to their employees because of their previous mistakes or something that they did not like on a past project provides a common example of the negativity bias.