Nouns and Adjectives. . .
Do you feel like you’re never quite out of the woods? Not exactly drowning, but certainly not cruising either. Like there’s always a bunch of problems, lurking just around the corner, waiting to be addressed.
Negativity bias is why we taste a tiny bit of sour in a sea of sweet. negativity bias. It’s our tendency to assign disproportionately large value, attention, and meaning to everything negative in our lives. Researchers have broke this bias into four parts:
Negativity differentiation. Adversity often requires more thinking and is, thus, conceptualized in more detail. Psychology has increasingly focused on negative emotions and most languages have more words for them too.
Negative potency. If you had to rate your happiness after finding $50, you’d likely rate it lower than your unhappiness after losing $50. This has to do with loss aversion, a concept discovered by Daniel Kahneman. It’s not as simple as saying one is twice as powerful as the other, but it’s there.
Steeper negative gradients. When you have to pay a $1,000 bill in a month’s time, you fret more and more about it the closer the deadline gets. In comparison, your excitement rises less when you expect to get $1,000.
Negativity dominance. If that $50 loss and find happen on the same day, you’ll likely go to bed thinking about the loss. In a mix of equally positive and negative events, our perception of the whole skews towards the bad.
The logical response, then, is to tone down our negativity bias. If fewer events threaten our survival, there’s less reason to view them as potentially such. It’s the old Stoic adage: You can’t control all that happens, but you can control how you think about what happens. This isn’t just a great filter to process life’s challenges through. In fact, it’s the only real solution.
Life is. Reality is. It’s all subjects and verbs. We’re the ones with the adjectives. That’s why the concept of ‘problem’ should be.an adjective. Not a noun.
Peace and Love, Jim
#development #thedailybuddha
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