The Brain's Negative Bias

THE RESEARCHER, JOHN CACIOPPO, showed volunteers positive pictures and negative pictures while he recorded the electrical activity of their brains. The positive pictures were designed to give the volunteers pleasant feelings — pictures of a Ferrari or a pizza, for example. The negative pictures produced unpleasant feelings. These were things like a mutilated face or a dead cat.

Cacioppo found that the volunteers' brains had more electrical activity when they looked at negative pictures. Their brains reacted more strongly to negative pictures than to positive or neutral ones.

In other words, your brain reacts more intensely to negative than positive events. This probably doesn't surprise you, although you might never have considered the implications of it. Dealing with dangerous, scary, threatening information is fundamental. It's about survival. Life or death. It doesn't get much more fundamental than that.

Researchers at the University of Essex in England found that people who were even mildly anxious were more fixated by threatening images. Threatening images capture their attention more quickly and they have a harder time taking their attention away from it.

By fixating more strongly on threatening images, a person can conduct more "detailed cognitive processing of potential threats in their environment," as the lead researcher, Elaine Fox put it. That seems like a useful survival strategy.

Other more general studies on stress show something similar. Stress gives everyone a strong tendency to fixate on unpleasant thoughts and threatening information.

Our minds naturally and quite spontaneously tend to fixate on the negative and overlook the positive.

CAUGHT BY THE NEGATIVE

Coming from a completely different angle, the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered something along the same lines. He found that when your mind isn't engaged in anything in particular, it tends to drift randomly. Thoughts of all kinds stream through an idle mind.

But eventually, in it's random meandering, the mind will think of something negative, and then what happens? It sticks. The mind stops meandering and sticks on the negative thought because negative thoughts fixate attention with more stickiness than positive or neutral thoughts. We get caught in the worried or angry thought, and it doesn't pass by like a neutral thought might. We naturally, and even against our will, give threatening information extra attention.

There's more. Because of the way our brains are constructed, we make certain kinds of mistakes. Brains — your brain, my brain — tend to overgeneralize and see the world in black-or-white, all-or-nothing terms. Unless we have trained ourselves to avoid it, we have a tendency to draw conclusions too quickly. These are naturally-occurring mistakes, the kind of errors every brain is prone to make.

In a way, these "mistakes" are simply the side-effects of a well-functioning, incredibly capable brain.

SEEING PATTERNS

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center hooked people up to a high-resolution functional MRI machine (to track the blood flow in the brain) and flashed pictures in front of them. The pictures were of either a square or a circle. They were asked to push a button in their right hand when they saw the square, and push the button in their left hand for the circle.

The squares and circles were presented in a random order, but of course short patterns would sometimes emerge — a string of all squares, for example, or alternation between a square and a circle for several cycles.

Their brains reacted when one of these short patterns ended. Their brains automatically detected and generalized patterns, and very quickly. They were given no reward for detecting patterns. They were not asked to detect patterns. In fact, they were told the pictures would be flashed randomly. Yet still, without any effort on their part, their brains automatically saw patterns in the random events and generalized — began to expect what the next picture would be. In previous similar studies testing their reaction time, the volunteers had a slower reaction time when an expected pattern was broken.

Your brain is predisposed to generalize. It automatically tries to see patterns. And for the most part, our ability to generalize is a good thing. Many moons ago, Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that when a doctor performed a dissection and then assisted in a birth, the women had a tendency to get childbed fever. He was able to detect a pattern, make a generalization, and his ability to generalize led to the practice of using antiseptics and sterilization, saving millions of unnecessary deaths over time.

Charles Darwin was able to create a generalization that governs the evolution of all of life. Quite a generalization! From that single generalization, new understandings about diseases were discovered that greatly improved the effectiveness of doctors. In fact, whole new sciences have issued from that single generalization.

What I'm trying to say is that those mistakes our brains tend to make (like overgeneralizations) are the inevitable secondary results of our great intelligence.

Your ability to recognize a face comes from your brain's ability to complete a pattern with minimal clues. It has been exceedingly challenging to create computers that can do it, and they still aren't as good at it as you are on a bad day without even trying. Your brain recognizes faces without any effort on your part. Your brain is so good at completing a pattern, even in dim light, even if you can only see half of the face, you recognize immediately who it is.

But this amazing ability also sometimes causes us to see patterns that don't really exist. We see a man in the moon. We see a horse in the clouds. We see the big dipper, the little dipper, Orion's belt. Our brains can take the most scant clues and see a pattern, without us making even the smallest effort to do so.

But especially given our brains' bias toward negativity, we also see patterns that create pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism — patterns that our brains have created out of minimal clues — patterns that don't actually exist.

I used to work with a woman who had two failed marriages and concluded, "All men are pigs." From only two examples, she created a generalization that included all three billion men on the planet! Her cynicism, her unwillingness to allow any men to get close to her, was the side-effect of two common mistakes our brains tend to make: 1) the brain's amazing ability to see a pattern with minimal clues, and 2) our brains tendency to look for evidence that confirms an already-existing conclusion.

SEEKING EVIDENCE

Once you have concluded something, you have a strong tendency to notice evidence that supports your conclusion and to explain away or ignore information that invalidates your conclusion, not only in your immediate perception, which is bad enough, but also in your memory.

In an experiment, for example, volunteers were asked to read a story about a woman. Let's call her Clare. Two days later, half the volunteers were asked to recall the story and decide how suited Clare was for a career as a real-estate agent. The other half were asked to rate her suitability for a job as a librarian. They were all asked to remember some examples of Clare's introversion and extroversion.

The volunteers looking at her ability as a real-estate agent remembered more examples of Clare's extroversion.

Those assessing her ability as a librarian recalled more instances of Clare's introversion.

The volunteers were not asked to bias their data. They had no stake in the matter. They weren't rewarded in any way to answer one way or another. But that's what human brains do. Your brain naturally and automatically looks at the world and your own memory as if it is trying to confirm whatever conclusions you've already drawn.

You are not the helpless victim of your brain's natural functioning. You can do something about it. But here we're looking at how the virus of negativity can enter the system. We're asking the question: "At what points are we vulnerable to infection?" How do otherwise healthy, reasonable people become pessimistic, cynical, and defeatist? One way is through the natural mistakes human brains are prone to make, combined with the brain's negative bias.

Let's recap. Human brains react more strongly to negative than positive information. They make certain kinds of mistakes in the way they process information — mistakes like overgeneralizing, seeing things in too black-and-white, a tendency to confirm conclusions they have already formed.

And because the brain is already biased toward the negative, those cognitive mistakes are more likely to be made in the direction of pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism.

A form of therapy has sprung up to directly deal with this phenomenon, called cognitive therapy. A cognitive therapist tries to root out the mistakes clients make in their thinking. Those mistakes are causing or sustaining their depression or anxiety. The therapy is simple, straightforward, and short term, and yet it has proven to be surprisingly effective. Cognitive therapy is the most thoroughly-researched form of therapy and when compared to other forms of therapy, it wins. It is the most effective of all therapies, both from objective measurements as well as the clients' own reports.

If you were a client, the most important thing a cognitive therapist would do for you is undermine your confidence in your mistaken conclusions. Overconfidence in our own conclusions is one of the worst mistakes we naturally make. We have a natural propensity — built into the brain — to draw conclusions with insufficient evidence and to hold those conclusions with excessive confidence. And to defend those conclusions with unjustified ardor.

A TASTE OF THE TILL

Here's a good example of holding conclusions with too much certainty. When the founder of the National Cash Register company, now known as NCR, John Patterson, first started the company, almost no stores used cash registers. But most store owners had a pilfering problem. In those days a "taste of the till" was an accepted part of the wages for a clerk or bartender as waiters' tips are today. With no way to keep tabs on what was actually being sold, it was easy for an employee to pocket some of the money without anyone knowing.

One of the biggest benefits Patterson pitched — the one that he thought would be the reason every store owner would jump at the opportunity — was that it could eliminate pilfering. The cash registers would not open until something was rung up, and everything rung up was printed on a little spool of paper inside the machine. The only one with a key to get into that spool was the owner. Viola! The owner could prevent employees from stealing the profits.

But Patterson ran into a deep-seated pessimism. Owners were quite sure a machine could never stop what they perceived to be human nature. Petty theft was accepted as inevitable. It was a classic case of defeatism, and very hard for Patterson's salespeople to overcome. The owners had concluded "that's just the way people are," and they held onto their conclusion with far too much confidence.

The conclusion was wrong, as most pessimistic conclusions are. When the machines were put into service, they did actually cut down on pilfering and more than paid for themselves in savings.

This kind of overconfidence is nothing new. It's a common feature of history. You could almost write history by telling the story of beliefs people throughout the ages have held with excessive confidence only to have them proven wrong. The earth is flat. The sun revolves around the earth. A man will never walk on the moon. And now, terrorism will always be with us. People throughout history — experts, people who should know better — have made statements with certainty when they weren't certain at all.

A common phrase in use in the 1930s and 40s was "When the kid next door walks on the moon." It used to be a phrase people used when they meant to say, "It'll never happen." This is an example of widespread defeatism — a certainty about a pessimistic conclusion that wasn't justified.

A story circulated around the internet a few years ago about Neil Armstrong. Maybe you've read it. The story goes that when Armstrong first stepped on the moon and said, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," he had made some other remarks, including, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."

Nobody knew who Armstrong was referring to, and when anyone ever asked him, he just smiled. Twenty-six years later, after giving a speech, someone brought it up again and Armstrong said, "Well, Mr. Gorsky has passed away, so I guess it's okay to answer that question. When I was a kid, I was playing baseball in my backyard and when I chased a ball to a place under my neighbors' window, I overheard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, 'Oral sex? You want oral sex!? You'll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!'"

The story isn't true, but it is believable because anyone growing up in the forties knows that was a common expression. A man walk on the moon? Yeah, right. It'll never happen. And everyone knew it would never happen. They had concluded it with excessive confidence.

When people do that with something petty, it's not a big deal. But when when a large number of people think, "There is nothing I can do about terrorism," we have a crippled, vulnerable population. When you have a brain that is naturally reactive to threatening stimuli and makes the few natural mistakes it tends to make (like overgeneralizing), and then mix in a little too much confidence in its own conclusions, the result is more pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism than you know what to do with.

"The ultimate tendency of civilization," wrote Augustus Hare, "is toward barbarism." What a conclusion! And obviously untrue, but even very intelligent people are vulnerable to the human brain's natural weakness.

SHORING UP THE VULNERABILITY

Of course, we're not going to leave you hanging. There is something you can do about your brain's natural negative bias. You probably do some of them already. A good place to start is Morale For The Citizen Warrior.

But a pessimist, even if he found out what he could do, might automatically think, "It'll take too much work," or "That's just the human condition," or "I'll never be able to change it. I'm not persistent enough. I have no will power. Etc." All those thoughts will stop a pessimist from trying to change, and of course they are all more of the same: Pessimistic conclusions exclaimed with far too much certainty.

The tendency to draw negative conclusions and then see the world through those conclusions can sometimes create self-fulfilling prophesies. Pessimistic, cynical, and defeatist conclusions can make themselves come true.

For example, a waiter gets three lousy tips in a row and thinks, "All my customers tonight are bad tippers." Even three bad tippers in a row is statistically not unusual in a random sample, but the waiter's brain sees a pattern and overgeneralizes and then makes a conclusion and is completely convinced of it.

So what does he do? He gives up the fight. He becomes pessimistic, defeated, cynical, at least for the rest of the night. He doesn't try to give good service because it doesn't matter. He's going to get a lousy tip no matter what he does. Why try?

And sure enough, people are not at all impressed with his uncaring service and tip him badly. His own negative conclusion has become a reality, brought into being by his own negative conclusion.

There is an old joke that reveals an understanding of this principle. One day a man gets a flat tire on a remote road and discovers he doesn't have a jack. He figures they might have one at a farmhouse he sees up the road, so he heads toward it.

As he walks along, he starts thinking to himself, and his ruminations are biased to the negative. "They'll probably be suspicious of a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere, and won't answer the door. Then I'll have to walk another mile to get to the next place and they won't have a jack. When I eventually find someone who answers the door and has a jack, they'll make me leave my wallet or something so I don't run off with their jack. What's the matter with these people? Can't they help their fellow man without running him through hoops or thinking the worst of him?!"

His ruminations build up into an indignant anger by the time he reaches the first house. A woman answers the door and says, "Can I help you?"

He yells, "I wouldn't take your help if you begged me! And you can keep your stupid jack!"

This joke exaggerates a human weakness to the point of funniness. And it summarizes this point of vulnerability. The brain has a natural negative bias combined with a built-in tendency to feel certain about its negative conclusions. This sometimes produces self-fulfilling prophesies. That is one way the defeatism can find its way into our thinking. Immunize yourself against it, and once you have it mastered, immunize your children and help your friends and family. Let terrorists find themselves unable to terrorize. Let them find a population that is not only immune to terror, but that responds to all their efforts with increased strength and determination. Let them run face-first into an impregnable wall of morale that defeats them utterly.