The Power of Bad Quotes

“To survive, life has to win every day. Death has to win just once. A small error or miscalculation can wipe out all the successes. The negativity bias is adaptive, the term biologists use for a trait that improves the odds of survival for an individual or a group.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“At Thanksgiving dinner, hand out pens and ask everyone at the table to write on the tablecloth something for which they’re grateful.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“by letting them return items long after the normal thirty-day grace period. Rental-car companies and hotels have learned to combat sticker shock by warning customers in advance of all the taxes and fees that will be added to the bill. But some businesses remain stubbornly oblivious to the peak-end rule. Why do so many shopping expeditions end with a long line at the checkout counter, and so many airline flights end with a half-hour wait at baggage claim? Why do so many online newspaper articles end with a correction informing the reader of some trivial mistake made in an earlier version? In the print era, running corrections was the only way to set the record straight once the paper had come off the presses, but today any error”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“The first step in dealing with bad apples is to identify them. If you’re trying to decide whether or not someone deserves the label, Sutton suggests starting with two questions: After talking to the alleged asshole, do you feel worse about yourself—oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful? A more elaborate approach is to use the Big Five personality test.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“1, and preferably a little higher. So we’ll suggest a guideline that we’ve taken to calling the Rule of Four: It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. We offer this as a rough gauge. We’re not claiming to have discovered a universal constant like the speed of light or Avogadro’s number. It’s a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. It doesn’t apply to”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“negative environment overwhelms the positive genes.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“If you remind yourself that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad thing, you'll know not to trust your immediate responses to bad events.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“When the researchers asked adults in the United States, Canada, and India whether life is long or short, and whether it’s easy or hard, the North Americans were no more sanguine than the Indians despite their statistical advantages in life expectancy and income.”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

“Harvard Business Review and a subsequent popular book, The No Asshole Rule. In looking for a scientific justification for the no-asshole rule, he discovered the literature on negativity bias and then focused on it in his own”
― John Tierney, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It