Only fairly recently have social scientists really understood why we seem to respond to negative things more strongly than we do to positive things. We click on negative images and news stories more than positive ones. We focus more energy worrying about negative outcomes than hoping for positive results. We even have more words to describe our negative emotions than we do for our positive emotions. There’s a name for this phenomenon: it’s called “negativity bias,” and scientists tell us that it’s probably a kind of survival mechanism. Our ancestors who worried less about what could make them
...more
