Bad Is Still (Much) Stronger Than Good

Does the mind overreact to bad things? Do people respond more strongly to threats than to opportunities, to failure than to success, to rejection than to acceptance, to criticism more than praise, and more?

Back around the end of the last century, I started noticing a pattern in many different lines of work. Many experiments had designs in which there were three cells. There would be a good treatment (for example, success), a bad one (failure), and a neutral control. The neutral should seemingly be smack in the middle. But usually, it wasn’t. Often the neutral control and the positive treatment had nearly the same effect on people’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. The bad one stood out.

Emboldened and curious, I recruited a few talented colleagues to help me search the literature. We found that effect over and over, in many different areas. It was there in emotions, thoughts, behaviors; romance and relationships; everyday experiences; extreme experiences (psychology has no opposite concept of trauma); brain activity; sex; parenting; memories; and plenty more. The review article was published in 2001 under the title “Bad Is Stronger than Good.”

Recently that article surpassed the milestone of 10,000 citations. For the uninitiated, citations are one way that scientific influence is measured. In plain terms, it measures how much other scientists write about your work. A citation means that another scientific publication listed the article in its bibliography section (and mentioned it in the text of the article).

Most scientific articles are never cited. Google Scholar rates each scientist on an “i10” index, that is, how many publications the scientist produced that have been mentioned in at least 10 other publications. That’s their main measure of success. Indeed, of my own. At 726 publications, this is only the second to pass that threshold. Back when we were compiling the review, we had no idea this paper would prove to be so popular.

John Tierney and I published a book aimed at a broad audience, extending this simple idea into other domains. It explains plenty of things that happen in business, politics, warfare, marriage and romance, and more. When doing research for the book, I read quite a few of the scientific articles that cited the original paper, to see whether researchers had found exceptions, challenged the basic notion, or elaborated the theory. There were a few interesting new points, but the majority of them simply confirmed that the usual pattern was there. Bad was stronger than good in their data, too.

All this was on my mind when I recently published a pair of posts about the future of social psychology. This field has been going through some difficult changes, and it is possible to make either an optimistic or a pessimistic case about its future. I exerted myself to do one of each.

As a generalist, I have had much experience reading scientific writings on different topics, and I encounter many disputes and controversies. I have trained myself to try to see each side. So projecting the future of social psychology was a good challenge for this training. I sought to make the best case I could for a bright and a dark future, respectively.

I realized this could be a fun way to test the theory that bad was stronger than good. I assumed most readers would be social psychologists themselves and would of course read both. I was careful to make the two posts the same (short) length and to post them on the same day, so it was a completely fair contest. Still, might there be a few more people who would read the dark future and skip the bright future, consistent with the bias toward the negative?

I was gobsmacked when I checked the numbers a week after they were posted. The bad one had been read seven (!) times as often as the good one. Far, far more people were interested in reading the bad than the good—even though they were posted together, and even though both of them referred readers to the other one, for balance. (Even now, almost three months later, the imbalance is still strong at four and a half to one.)

I don’t know how many people have read both. (I thought almost everyone would.) My friend, the august Constantine Sedikides, who is known not just for his scintillating intellect but also his happy, good-natured outlook, recently told me he read only the positive one. In principle, it is possible nobody read them both, which would make a mockery of my scrupulous efforts to present them as an equal pair.

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Why the imbalance? One colleague speculated that my own reputation as an optimistic booster of social psychology contributed. People do pay more attention to violated expectancies than confirmed ones, and so they may have been more surprised to see me write a negative than a positive column.

But I doubt that that was a big factor. Most likely, it is yet another indication of the greater power of bad than good.