#574： The Power of Bad — Overcoming the Negativity Effect
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Summary
John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister discuss their new book, The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, and how to use the power of bad to your advantage.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Have you ever been heaped with praise only to ignore it in favor of focusing on the lone
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piece of criticism you received? That's the power that bad things wield and it's a power
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that humans need to learn how to both harness and mitigate. My guest today lays out both
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sides of that coin in his book that he co-authored with psychologist Roy Baumeister. His name
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is John Tierney and the book is The Power of Bad, How the Negativity Effect Rules Us
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and How We Can Rule It. We begin our conversation discussing how much stronger bad is than good
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and how many good things it takes to offset a single bad one. We then dig into the implications
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of the fact that bad things have a much stronger impact than good ones, including how you really
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only need to be a good enough parent to your kids, the best way to deliver criticism to
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others, and why religions that emphasize hell have historically won more adherence than those
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that focus on heaven. We also talk about how negativity is contagious and why it's true
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that one bad apple can spoil a whole bunch. We end our conversation with a look at whether
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or not social media is a negative force in our lives and John's advice on how to not let
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those he calls the merchants of bad and the media make us think that things in the world
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are worse than they really are. Lots of insights in this show on both how to use the power of
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bad to your advantage and overcome its negative effects. After the show's over, check out our show
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notes at aom.is slash power of bad. All right, John Tierney, welcome to the show.
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So you have co-written a book called The Power of Bad, How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How
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We Can Rule It. Your co-author is Roy F. Baumeister, who we've had him on the show before to discuss his
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work on willpower. And also, he wrote a book about masculinity a while back ago.
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So this book is based on a paper that Roy did a couple years ago called Bad is Stronger Than Good.
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Where did he get this hunch for this hypothesis that bad things are stronger than good things in our
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Roy had been thinking about this for a long time. In fact, his first inkling of this came along
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decades earlier when he was a young guy in a relationship with a woman who, you know, he
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had great times with her. She was wonderful in many ways, but she also had a real temper.
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And so, you know, at times he was really madly in love with her. And other times he was despairing,
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this is never going to work. And he didn't know what to do. So he fell back on the classic
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stratagem of a social scientist. He started collecting data. And at the end of every day,
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he would start, he would write down, was this a good day or a bad day? Am I, am I glad to be in
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this relationship today? Or am I, or would I rather be out of it? And he wasn't sure what
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he'd find. And he kind of thought, you know, I, I guess if there are at least four good days for
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every bad day, then, you know, that would be good enough for me, but he wasn't sure. And if it was
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one-to-one, you know, that, you know, that would be bad, you know, that I should get out of this.
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So he did it for about six months and he found that after a while, the ratio remained steady. It was
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like two good days for every bad day. And this was kind of right in between his range. He didn't
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quite know what it meant, but so he didn't really reach any scientific reach. He just,
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but in his gut, he got out of the relationship. And he just thought about this ratio, you know,
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which is now known as the positivity ratio, which is a number of good things for every bad thing.
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So he thought about this a little bit. And then, you know, in the eighties and nineties,
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behavioral economists were doing experiments in loss aversion showing that people, you know,
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cared much more about losing money than they did about gaining money. You know, that it hurt much
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more to lose a dollar than it did, you know, than the joy of making a dollar. And there were some
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other experiments. Some psychologists had found that, you know, that a bad first impression was
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much easier to get than, than, than a good first impression. And it was also tougher to lose.
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So he noticed a couple of these things and wondered, you know, I wonder why bad things are
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stronger than good things there. So he and some colleagues looked into this and they thought,
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uh, the way we'll do this is we'll try and find counter examples. Let's find some examples where
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good things are stronger. And then we'll be able to figure out what it, you know, what exactly is it
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that gives bad its greater power in some situations. And to their surprise, you know, you know,
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they look through the literature and, you know, in psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics,
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they just could not find counter examples. You know, bad was relentlessly strong. You know,
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the bad parenting, you know, I made a big difference. Good parenting didn't really make
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that much difference. Bad health made a big difference in your life. Good health didn't
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make, you know, such a difference. You know, penalties, you know, a bad outcome motivated you
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more than a reward, a good outcome. So they put all this together and then wrote this paper called
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bad is stronger than good. And at the same time, another psychologist at the university of
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Pennsylvania, uh, Paul Rosen, uh, he was working on this from a different angle and, and, but he'd
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also noticed this, this same general pattern. And so this was something that it was this, you know,
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really important phenomenon about life that bad is stronger than good, but it really hadn't been
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noticed because it crossed into so many different fields. And, and so they were the first to put this
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together. And since then, you know, it's not, it's now known as the negativity effect, also called
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negativity bias. And it's been studied, you know, there've been hundreds of papers, you know, studying
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this, confirming it, analyzing it, and, you know, figuring out what to do about it. So let's talk
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about this ratio that Roy has found as well as other people have found in other domains. Uh, positive
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psychologists have found this, economists have found this. So this kind of gives an idea of like
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roughly, not exactly, but roughly how much stronger bad is. Well, there've been a bunch of
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different studies that, you know, they've looked, you know, you know, other people have done what
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Roy did. They, they've, you know, they've had people keep diaries and, um, every day and answer
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questions every day. And they, and they classify the day as a good day or a bad day. And they find that,
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you know, you know, that, that people tend to, you know, people who are doing, you know, who are
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doing okay, tend to have three good days for every bad day. And, you know, behavioral economists have
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done their own studies, you know, exactly how, you know, how many dollars do I have to offer you as
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a reward, you know, to get you to risk, uh, losing $1. And, you know, the results range a little bit.
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When you're talking about money, people can be more rational and, you know, they're sometimes,
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you know, if you're offering $2, you know, they're willing to risk losing a dollar, which in itself
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irrational, of course, but, but, but most cases they've also done studies of, you know, they track
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workers' moods during the day and see how many good interactions they have, how many
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bad interactions, what's the impact of each one. They've also tracked, you know, they've looked at
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couples in the laboratory as they talk to each other and they measure the good things they say
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and the bad things they say. And they actually, you know, measure their physical responses as
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they're talking to each other. And so, and what the studies show generally is that it usually takes
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three good things, you know, to have the impact of one bad thing. So we recommend the rule of four,
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which is if you want to do better than that, you know, you know, try to do at least four good
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things for every bad thing. So that, you know, that means that if you're late for one meeting,
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you're not going to make up for it by, by showing up early the next time. You got to do more than
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that. If you say, you know, one bad thing to someone, one hurtful thing, you know, plan on saying at least
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No, yeah. We've seen that. Uh, we've talked about, uh, relationships on the show, the five to one
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that Gottman, John Gottman found, right? So it doesn't matter if arguments are going to kill
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relationship, but you have to have five positive interactions with your partner to make up for
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that. Right. They said five is, you know, that's kind of way above, you know, the norm. And, you
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know, and, and, and, and I mean, the higher the positivity rates are generally the better. I mean,
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there are in some studies, you know, when they've analyzed people's positive emotions and their
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feelings, they found some people just have sky high. They, you know, they claim to have no negative
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feelings. Everything's positive. And that's a bit deranged, you know, because they're, you know,
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those people are a bit manic, but in general, you know, you know, four, you know, five is even
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better than four. Usually, you know, that the higher the positivity ratio, generally the better
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it is because, you know, bad is stronger than good, but good can prevail by basically swamping bad
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with numbers. You overcome, you overwhelm it by force of numbers.
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So why is bad stronger than good? Like, why do we have this negativity bias? I mean, we,
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obviously we have it for a reason, right? It's adaptive, right? Our ancestors decided,
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oh, this actually is good for you to like focus on the negative more than the positive.
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Right. Yeah. I mean, you're exactly right about it being adaptive that on the ancient Savannah,
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you know, the guys who sat around focusing on how great this berry tasted, you know, are not going
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to do as well as the guys who are more alert for, you know, let's make sure it's not poisonous.
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You know, let's watch out for that hungry lion out there, basically being alert because it takes only
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one mistake to kill you. And so, you know, to pass on your genes, you know, the more vigilant you are,
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the more attention you pay to bad things, the better chance that your genes will be passed on.
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And so that, you know, therefore it's really important. It's not so important to savor the
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great taste of a food, but it's really important to remember, you know, which foods are poisonous,
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which ones will, will make you sick. So, you know, there's a real good adaptive reason for it.
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And it's still useful. I mean, one mistake can still really hurt and one mistake can still be fatal.
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One mistake can still, you know, ruin your career. I mean, one bad step can ruin your reputation.
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So it is important. And there are real benefits to this negativity bias because it does protect you.
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And also, but the other reason that, you know, the bad really, that this negativity bias evolved
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is that it teaches you. It's the best way to, you know, to learn, that you learn more from failure
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than from success. You know, when you succeed at something that goes great, but you don't learn
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a lot because everything went well. You know, when you get a bad mark on a test, when you fail
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something, it forces you to look at, you know, what went wrong? What did I do wrong? And to improve.
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And because the pain of failure is so great, you know, the pain of bad is so great. It motivates
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you to avoid that the next time. I don't want this to happen again. So there are real good reasons
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why it's there. And, you know, and, and young people are especially susceptible to negativity
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bias. And this makes evolutionary sense too, because when you're young, that's when you
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really need to learn, you know, you've got to pay attention. You've got to look around
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at the world, figure out what you're doing wrong. And so, you know, paying attention to
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the mistakes and to the bad stuff makes a lot of sense in that age. You know, teenagers
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are so, you know, so self-conscious, you know, they're, they're, they're figuring their
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way in the world and they're very attuned to any sort of bad things that happens to
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Well, you said that this negativity bias is still adaptive in our modern world, but in
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any ways, is there any ways that it's sort of out of sync with our modern environment?
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It is. And, and again, the analogy about, you know, back to the ancient Savannah, it was
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adaptive back then, you know, when food was scarce to, you know, during lean times, you
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should fatten up and eat as much as you can. So that was adaptive then, you know, but
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when you're surrounded by junk food all day long, you know, that's tempting you all
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day long, it's not so adaptive. And so we end up with, with this huge problem of
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obesity and from people eating too much and eating the wrong kinds of food. And so
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similarly today we are in a high bad environment. We are just surrounded by, by
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people all day long, you know, on television, on our, on our, on our phones, on our
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many screens, basically the merchants of bad, we call them. And they're, they're
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trying to scare you because they know the easiest way to get your attention on the
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screen is to, is to appeal to that, you know, to something is to scare you. There's a crisis
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in the world. There's, you know, something, there's a danger to your life. Is your partner
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cheating on you? Five signs are doing that. You know, these, these ads that pop up on
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your screens. So we're surrounded by that all day long and the news media, you know, I've
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been, I've been a journalist, you know, my whole adult life and I, and we're the worst
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at it. And it's one of the reasons that I got into this because I, I was wondering
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why do we constantly look for bad news and why do we hype to bad news so much? You
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know, most trends are in the world are positive and yet we can take the most
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positive trend and find one bad example and that's what we write about and it's a
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crisis and, you know, and so we're out to scare people. So in this high bad
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environment, we recommend going on a low bad diet that you basically need to curate, you
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know, what you see and watch and, and what you focus on so that you don't get
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this distorted view of the world. It's like, you know, don't gorge, you know, junk
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food is fine and in moderation, but you don't want to gorge on it and you don't
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And so what the rest of the book talks about is looking at this, the power of bad,
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this negativity effect on how we can use it, sort of harness it for our benefit, but
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also how to mitigate the downsides. And in one area where you look at how you can
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use the bad effect to improve your life are relationships. So how do negative
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moments that we experience in our life, how do they affect relationships? And if
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you want to improve a relationship, does it, does it help more to increase
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positive experience or just eliminate the bad stuff?
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Well, researchers have, you know, have analyzed this by tracking couples over a
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long time. They'll, you know, they'll watch them when they, when they meet and then
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see which relationships last and which ones don't, and they observe their
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behavior at different times. And what these studies show is that it's the bad
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stuff that matters, that it's, it's how you deal with negativity that matters, that
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you know, the initial passion, you know, you know, how good you feel about it, you
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know, that doesn't last and that's not enough to sustain a relationship. So, and the
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couples that are able to avoid negativity, the best thing you can do is avoid
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negativity by being sensitive to your partner and just watching out for things
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that bother them, even if that seems stupid to you. And also, you have to guard about the
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way that you look at your partner. You know, in relationships that last, people tend to
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develop what researchers call positive illusions about their partner. They basically learned,
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they trained themselves, or they've got some knack for this, for overlooking their
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partner's flaws. They have this unrealistic view of their partner. And, and, and it's
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really helpful in a relationship. And the nice thing is, is that after a while, the
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partner at first doesn't really believe the same about themselves, but if they're, you
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know, if their partner really believes it, they come to see it themselves. And so you
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both feel better. There have been experiments, brain scanning experiments were
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fascinating where they track couples that, and they looked at the ones that broke up and
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the ones that stayed together. And when they, you know, went back and looked at, you
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know, at their initial brain scans, when these people were first in love, they found
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that the couples that stayed together, the big difference, and they weren't expecting
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this, it was a surprise to them. They found that the couples that were destined
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for success, the part of their brain that was, that's involved in making negative
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judgment, they tamped down the activity in that part of the brain when, when they
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were shown a photograph of their beloved. You know, they basically, their brains were
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just shutting down that negative judgment when they looked at their partner. Now, I
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mean, all of us said, that's not something you can just, you know, do, you know, you
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can't tell your brain to shut down there, but you can make more conscious efforts not
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to focus on your, on your partner's flaws and, and to basically learn to give them the
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benefit of the doubt. One of the biggest mistakes people make, psychologists call it
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the fundamental attribution error, is that, you know, if your partner shows up late for
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dinner and they, and they tell you, well, I was, I got delayed at the office, the traffic
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was bad. You can either attribute that to, well, yeah, there were just circumstances
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beyond their control. They couldn't help it, you know, and that's why they're late.
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But what we often tend to do is think, no, you know, they're selfish. They don't care
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about me. They, you know, they don't mind keeping me waiting. They don't love me. And
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you tend to attribute this one bad thing, this bad action, you attribute it to some
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permanent character flaw. And that's, that's what's called the fundamental attribution error,
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which is something that was actually caused by temporary external circumstances. We blame
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on their character. So we see, you know, a driver run a stop sign and we think automatically
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he's an awful driver. You know, whereas, you know, sometimes if we make that same mistake,
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we go, well, I just didn't see the stop sign was blocked by a tree. So, and when couples have studied
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people's attributional style, as they call it, they found that couples who tend to immediately say,
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yeah, when something goes wrong, they say, yeah, that's just the way he is. Just typical.
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They do that. You know, this is what drives me crazy about them. That the couples that do that
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are much more likely to break up. And the ones who were more likely to give their partner the benefit
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of the doubt to think, yeah, it was, you know, traffic was probably bad or it was just an unusually
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bad day at the office. I'm not going to blame them for it. And then, you know, the other thing is when
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something goes wrong, when they, you know, say something that bothers you, when they do something,
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we love the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg got from her mother-in-law on her wedding day.
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The mother-in-law told her in every marriage, it sometimes helps to be a little deaf. You know,
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that basically being able to, you know, to ignore something bad that happened instead of getting
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angry and retaliating, that just goes a long way in reducing the negativity in a marriage.
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And now there's some things that you do have to respond to. I mean,
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you shouldn't be a doormat and let your partner run all over you. But if you do respond, you know,
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it's really important to stay calm and don't retaliate, you know, don't sulk, you know,
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don't angrily retaliate, you know, don't accuse them of, you know, of being a bad person or make
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accusations. Just explain calmly why something bothers you and don't escalate the conflict.
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Because bad emotions are so powerful. They have so much impact and they're so contagious
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that if you respond angrily, they're going to get even angrier and you just start this cycle of
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retaliation. And so a minor disagreement, you know, just escalates to a major fight. You know,
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there've been interesting experiments, but they play a game called dictator where people have to decide
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how to divide up money and they take turns. And when one person starts behaving negatively,
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it just escalates, you know, and it just gets worse and worse. And the people get angrier and
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angrier at each other and more and more selfish. So basically got to try to avoid doing bad things,
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avoid over-interpreting things that your partner's done. And when things do go wrong,
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give them the benefit of the doubt or at least stay calm and don't escalate.
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Well, another area of life where we have relationships is with our kids and parents these days are really
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anxious about if they're parenting right, if they're doing enough. So they get these books on how to
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raise, you know, resilient kids and how to get their kids be a star athlete or do well in school and they
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pay for all this stuff. But your research in the book that you highlight says that probably isn't doing
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that much and you'd be better off just being a good enough parent.
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Yeah. I mean, this is some of the cheerier research, I think, really, because what it shows is you don't have
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to kill yourself. You don't have to be the super parent. You don't have to be a tiger mom or a
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helicopter parent because, you know, this is an aspect of the negativity effect where bad parenting
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makes a big difference. Good parenting does not make that much difference. So as long as you're not
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neglectful, as long as you're not abusive, as long as you're not violent, your kid is going to turn out
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okay no matter what else you do, as long as you avoid the bad stuff. And we base this, you know,
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these are studies about the effect of the home environment and the parents on kids' IQs. And what
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it shows is that a bad home environment can, you know, can really stop a child from reaching his full
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IQ. But a good home environment, you know, whether it's good or whether it's stellar, you know, whether
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they hire the best tutors and pay for the best schools, that doesn't raise the child's IQ. All you can
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really do is avoid the bad stuff from happening. So as long as you avoid the bad stuff, you know, you don't
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have to go to every soccer game, you don't have to help with every school project. And so we advise
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people to be just a good enough parent, just avoid the mistakes. And that holds true for all kinds of
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roles in life. I mean, you know, be a good enough spouse, be a good enough friend, be a good enough
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boss, be a good enough worker. You don't have to be a superstar. You don't have to go all these extra
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miles to do it. You just have to, you should focus on avoiding the bad stuff. You know, there's,
00:20:36.860
there's interesting research about how much credit you get for doing extra and there, and this was
00:20:42.520
inspired by a researcher who noticed that when stuff from Amazon arrived late, she was really
00:20:48.240
irritated. But when it came early, she didn't, you know, feel particularly grateful. So they did a
00:20:53.140
bunch of experiments where, where, you know, students would get, you know, somebody would promise to help
00:20:57.520
someone solve puzzles. And if they didn't fulfill the number of puzzles that they helped to help with,
00:21:03.540
people really gave them bad marks, but if they did 50% extra, if they did extra work,
00:21:08.560
they got very little extra credit. And, and there were some other experiments showing the same thing
00:21:12.780
that if people got tickets from a ticket broker that were worse than they were expected, they were
00:21:16.580
furious. If the seats were better than now, you know, they didn't really give the, the broker much
00:21:22.400
extra credit. So you don't, you get relatively little extra credit for, you know, for doing more than
00:21:28.320
you promised. But if you fall short of what you promised, then you pay a big price. So just focus
00:21:34.200
on not breaking promises, not on, on being the superstar parent or, you know, who does so much
00:21:40.180
more than is expected. So yeah, at work, uh, manage expectations, like under promise, over deliver,
00:21:46.780
don't over promise, and then under, because people are going to remember that more.
00:21:50.140
Right. People, just people remember the stuff you didn't, you know, the promises you didn't keep.
00:21:54.700
They remember the bad. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:21:59.120
And now back to the show. So I think an area where we've all experienced the negativity bias
00:22:04.580
or the negativity effect is when we receive criticism and it's painful. And it's even painful
00:22:10.860
whenever someone says something good about like, even if other people are praising what you've done,
00:22:15.160
like at work, whatever, there's like that one guy who says, you know, Hey, this could be better.
00:22:19.980
That just really, that's the thing you focus on. And so we, there's a tendency to like want to avoid
00:22:25.120
criticism, but criticism is what lets us get better. So are there any tactics that you and Roy came
00:22:31.620
across where we can get the benefits of criticism without it stinging so much and where we just
00:22:39.900
Yeah. I mean, there's two aspects of it. One of it, as far as it, on the receiving end, I mean,
00:22:44.920
one bit of practical advice we offer. When I started writing them, I was writing an op-ed column
00:22:50.260
at the New York times and I'm kind of a libertarian and the New York times audience is not like that.
00:22:55.920
And another journalist who, who had been a liberal writer at the wall street journal editorial page,
00:23:01.520
he was in the opposite position. You know, you know, he was, he was writing for an audience of
00:23:05.180
different, his one piece of advice to me was don't read the mail
00:23:09.420
because you're just going to get excoriated. And, and our advice is, especially in dealing
00:23:16.840
with online comments, because people get this and they go through it. And as you say, the one
00:23:20.840
bad comment, you get all these supportive comments, congratulations, good work, but one that there's
00:23:25.500
one snarky thing and that's what stays with you. It's like writers read a review of a book where
00:23:29.980
it's a rave, but all they can think about is that one line faulting something in the book.
00:23:34.860
So one bit of advice is if you can, you do want to learn from the criticism, you know,
00:23:40.760
when you post something online and someone and people react to it, there may, there, there
00:23:45.680
may well be something useful in their response. But if you read the stuff yourself, you're just
00:23:50.820
going to fixate on the bad stuff and get, and it's, it's debilitating, as you say. So as have
00:23:56.140
someone else read it for you, pick out the useful stuff, keep out the, just the basically the,
00:24:01.100
you know, the useless snarky stuff. And also try to follow that four to one ratio that,
00:24:06.420
you know, that, you know, give you at least four good things for every bad thing.
00:24:10.160
Now, you know, when it comes to giving criticism, most of us are pretty bad at that, I think.
00:24:15.260
And, you know, the psychologists have found in, when they ask people how they like to give
00:24:19.860
criticism, you know, if there's good news and bad news, most people would rather start
00:24:24.920
with the good news. It's a lot more pleasant to start a conversation, to tell someone that.
00:24:28.800
And then, you know, so you say the nice things, you're doing a great job with this, and you
00:24:33.020
are like that, you did that well. Oh, and here's one area that I'm concerned about we need to work
00:24:38.720
on. And that's the easiest way to give the criticism, is to start, to ease into it and
00:24:44.260
start out as Mr. Nice Guy. But most people, if you ask them how they'd like to receive good news
00:24:50.880
and bad news, they would rather get the bad news first. And that, that's actually the best way to
00:24:56.080
deliver it. Because when you start out with a lot of praise for someone, they'll, you know,
00:25:01.300
they're listening. But then when you hit them with that bit of criticism, it's, you know, the power of
00:25:05.460
bad is so strong. It's just that jolt to the brain. And so, and the brain immediately focuses on that,
00:25:12.560
and it forgets the praise. You know, an example of this, when a computer crashes, you know, the tech
00:25:18.280
people say, well, what were you doing when the, you know, right before the computer crashed?
00:25:21.980
And people often just can't remember at all what they were doing because that sudden, awful thing,
00:25:27.400
oh my God, the computer's crashed. You just forget what happened before that. You're just so focused
00:25:32.060
on this new threat. And it's the same way when you get criticism, you forget the praise.
00:25:37.540
So, and if you save the criticism for the end, then people walk out, that's all they remember.
00:25:42.260
So it's, and they're demoralized. So it's better to, I mean, you might start out with saying,
00:25:47.640
you know, I mean, if you're evaluating an employee, you say, you know, you had a good year and we're
00:25:51.940
looking forward to another good one. So they know they're not going to get fired, but basically get
00:25:55.980
the bad stuff out of the way early. And then after you give the bad stuff, then their brains on high
00:26:01.160
alert, you know, and then they'll start paying attention and remembering the good stuff. And,
00:26:06.440
you know, you pivot from the bad to the good, try to do, you know, at least four good things for every
00:26:11.860
bad thing and try to look at things from a positive standpoint. You know, you say that maybe you had
00:26:16.280
trouble, you know, working with some people this year, you're working with a team, but you're
00:26:21.000
great on your own. We're going to do more solo projects for you next year and look at and frame
00:26:26.840
the criticism in a positive way that this was a problem, but we're going to solve that by doing
00:26:32.180
this the other way. So it sounds like you don't even do the criticism sandwich where you go positive,
00:26:37.000
negative, positive, just start negative, then end with four, like increasing positive things.
00:26:42.760
Right. I mean, yeah, basically that's it. I think that they, I mean,
00:26:45.840
that's the way to do it. Now you also, and we cite some research in this, that you don't want them to,
00:26:53.120
you know, walk out, you know, just only remembering the positive and they really will remember the
00:26:57.560
criticism, but it does help, you know, at the end to remind them a bit that we do have some things we
00:27:02.460
have to improve that. So I think that, you know, get most of the criticism out of the way, then,
00:27:07.680
you know, elaborate some praise on, and then an end with reminders of how we're going to improve
00:27:12.700
next year. So they're still motivated. You know, there's still that power of bad, you know,
00:27:17.000
to motivate them to improve because, you know, that's what you need to improve is you need that
00:27:21.340
motivation. And then there's nothing like, like the negativity effect to motivate people.
00:27:26.520
Well, speaking of motivation, there's been a debate within psychology and managerial science on
00:27:33.100
what's the best way to motivate employees. And you all see this in, with family, with parents,
00:27:37.780
what's the best way to motivate kids to do what you want them to do? And there's that age-old debate,
00:27:42.420
is it sticks or carrots? And lately it seems like it's more carrots, like, you know, provide rewards,
00:27:47.500
help people flourish. But you guys highlight research, no, sticks are actually more powerful
00:27:51.560
than carrots. Right. You know, the, that whole saying about the, you know, the carrot or the stick,
00:27:56.840
it comes from, you know, there were these 19th century cartoons and there was, you know, advice for
00:28:01.980
parents that, you know, the way to motivate a horse or donkey to go forward was you dangle a
00:28:07.020
carrot in front of them instead of hitting them with a stick. And it was this little sort of
00:28:11.080
parable to tell you that rewards work better. And as we're saying in the book, did anyone ever see,
00:28:17.300
you know, a horse winning the Kentucky Derby with a carrot in front of it? You know, the jackies are
00:28:21.940
using the whip and, and that's, um, so it's, in our interpretation of that, of that parable of the
00:28:28.960
carrot versus the stick is that people would rather use the carrot. It's, you know, it's much more
00:28:34.080
pleasant to do that than it is to, you know, punishing people isn't fun unless you're a sadist.
00:28:39.040
But in fact, you know, the stick is generally more effective. You know, there's a lot of research on
00:28:44.860
this. Unfortunately, this lesson got lost, especially with children and in schools, thanks to the self
00:28:51.900
esteem movement that, you know, we had, you know, the 1970s and 80s. Now that was really one of the
00:28:58.920
sororier mistakes in psychology. Roy Baumeister, my coauthor, he did, when he started his career,
00:29:04.300
he was working on self esteem and it looked like a promising area. And then he realized that
00:29:08.620
the psychologists just had it backwards. You know, you know, they thought that, well, because,
00:29:12.980
you know, people who succeed have high self esteem, if we can just boost kids' self esteem,
00:29:17.560
they'll succeed. And he realized that they had the causation backwards. When you succeed,
00:29:23.100
that boosts your self esteem. But when you boost someone's self esteem, it doesn't help you succeed.
00:29:28.300
It doesn't work that way. So, but the consequences of that is that everybody gets a trophy philosophy
00:29:35.320
that evolved with kids and, you know, nobody, nobody loses. And that has translated into the
00:29:41.340
education system where there's just been rampant grade inflation, both at the high school level
00:29:47.640
and at the college level where, you know, the average grade places is an A minus now. And as a result,
00:29:54.340
you know, students in both high school and in college, they are learning less than they used
00:29:59.080
to in the past. And there's some clever experiments. You know, there's a famous one with young kids
00:30:04.880
where they were given a series of tasks to learn. And, and some of the kids received a marble as a
00:30:11.740
reward for every, you know, right answer they did. And they would, you know, put the marble in a jar.
00:30:16.940
And the other kids got a jar full of marbles and they took out a marble for each long answer.
00:30:24.060
And the kids who had the marble taken out learned a lot faster than the kids who got the reward.
00:30:30.560
So, and they found that in other examples where they've, you know, offered bonuses to teachers if
00:30:36.540
their students, you know, did well that year and, and, and raised their test scores. But sometimes,
00:30:42.660
and as a control, as a comparison, that they told, they gave some teachers the money ahead of time and
00:30:49.460
said, if your kids do not learn better this year, we're going to take that bonus away. So, it was framed
00:30:55.520
as a penalty rather than a year-end bonus. And the, and the teachers who faced that penalty, their students
00:31:03.060
did better than the ones who got the reward at the end. So, in general, you know, it's better, penalties
00:31:08.740
are stronger than rewards. And, I mean, we're not against rewarding kids. I mean, you want to give,
00:31:13.800
you know, a child bonus for every A&S report card, give them a reward for that, fine. But I would also
00:31:19.180
deduct money when they're slacking off and they're not doing well. And I think schools should really
00:31:24.840
give honest grades instead of trying to make students feel better. They should, when kids do
00:31:29.580
bad in a class, they should get a bad grade because they're not going to learn otherwise.
00:31:33.060
I thought it was interesting when that chapter you talk about cares versus sticky, the interesting
00:31:37.580
tip that you started off with was religion and that you highlight research that religions that
00:31:42.580
focus on hell and damnation actually flourish more than the ones who just talk about heaven and angels
00:31:52.120
Yeah, you know, it's a fascinating trend. I was, I was really intrigued by it. There's a sociologist of
00:31:58.080
religion named Rodney Stark who has traced this and you really see it in the history of religion in
00:32:02.820
America where, you know, back, back in colonial times, America was not a very religious place.
00:32:08.080
I mean, you know, the Puritans and the early settlers have been very devout, but, you know,
00:32:12.840
people were, I think they had six drinks a day. There were more taverns in, I think, Boston than in,
00:32:17.760
you know, in Amsterdam and, and, you know, the lots of premarital sex, lots of illegitimate births.
00:32:23.820
And then there was this great awakening that happened in the early 18th century. And,
00:32:28.240
and what happened was it was these, these hell fearing ministers went around preaching,
00:32:33.620
you know, damnation and, and Jonathan Edwards, you know, gave his famous sermon, you know,
00:32:38.380
sinners in the hand of an angry God. At that point, the, the established religions, you know,
00:32:43.400
were the Anglican religion, you know, which became Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism.
00:32:47.720
And they preached a more gentle cerebral kind of religion. You know, their ministers went to Harvard
00:32:52.780
and Yale and some of them didn't particularly even believe in hell, but the Methodists who were
00:32:57.720
the considered these uneducated rubes and they were, you know, they looked down very much by the
00:33:03.580
religious establishment. The Methodists became the big, you know, the largest, uh, religious
00:33:09.420
denomination in the United States. And then they eventually, you know, they eventually went
00:33:14.520
mainstream, you know, their ministers started going to seminaries. They started preaching a more
00:33:19.100
benevolent message. And then they promptly faded where it was hell fearing Baptists and Catholics
00:33:24.680
became the dominant ones. And then when the Catholic church, you know, in the Vatican, you know,
00:33:30.020
to council in the 1960s, they softened it, you know, a lot of their things and they suffered a big
00:33:35.740
decline of membership. And so you get evangelicals and Pentecostals rising. So there is this thing
00:33:41.660
that what gets people into the pews on Sunday is fear of hell much more than the promise of a
00:33:48.200
celestial reward. And there's been some really interesting research that psychologists have done
00:33:52.540
where they've looked at surveys around the world. And they have found that in countries where more
00:33:57.900
people believe in hell, you know, versus people who just believe in heaven, in those countries,
00:34:03.060
there's a lower crime rate. And they did a very clever experiment in the lab once where they,
00:34:08.300
they, they were giving students a test and they told them that there was a glitch in the computer and,
00:34:13.520
and they made it possible to cheat. But so, but please don't do that. We're going to fix this glitch.
00:34:18.200
So of course the researchers are watching to see who cheats and they found that, and then they
00:34:24.380
saw who cheated and who didn't. And they found that what predicted it, it didn't really matter
00:34:28.960
if you were religious or not. Didn't, you know, most of the other variables didn't matter, but what
00:34:33.180
did matter was how you conceived of God. And if you thought of God as a more punishing, vengeful God,
00:34:39.420
then you were less likely to cheat. You know, that hell is stronger than heaven, at least when it comes to
00:34:45.940
deterring bad behavior. Right. So yeah, another, another example, manifestation of the negativity
00:34:50.440
effect. Yes. Another place where people see it is on teams, this negativity effect in the, the,
00:34:55.340
there's that, you know, Osmond song, one bad apple, don't spoil the whole bunch of girls.
00:34:59.720
Right. Is, I mean, is that true? Is Donnie right? Or does one bad apple actually spoil the whole bunch?
00:35:04.600
Well, well, you know, the Osmonds, the whole meaning of that cliche changed because of that
00:35:10.000
song. I mean, now it used to be one rotten apple spoils his companions and that goes all the way
00:35:15.960
back to Chaucer, Benjamin Franklin did it. And then the Osmonds came out with this song,
00:35:20.300
one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, which in the first place, apples don't really grow in
00:35:25.120
bunches, right? And, and so the, and so the, the meaning of that cliche change where suddenly it was,
00:35:33.060
you know, the one bad apple is not representative and, you know, that, yeah, that something went
00:35:37.880
wrong there, but that's just one bad, every place will have a few bad apples. It doesn't mean the
00:35:42.440
whole place is bad. But in fact, what the research shows is that negative behavior is in fact
00:35:48.120
contagious. Bad apples do spoil their companions. Then there've been interesting experiments where
00:35:53.540
they've looked at people working in teams and, you know, the researchers thought that if you measure
00:35:59.480
the average ability of the team members, that would predict how well the team works, but what
00:36:04.680
actually predicted how well the team would work was the ability, the performance of the worst person
00:36:10.360
on the team. Because one person, one bad apple brings down the whole team. You know, there were some
00:36:16.000
really interesting experiments where they had people acting out different varieties. Researchers
00:36:21.180
classify bad apples into several categories. There's, there's the jerk who's just kind of obnoxious to
00:36:28.180
people and belittles them. There's the downer who's just depressed and, and convinced everything
00:36:33.820
will turn out wrong. There's a slacker, somebody who doesn't pull his own weight. They had an actor
00:36:39.040
to, to portray each of these types and he would sit down with the group. And, you know, when he was a
00:36:45.020
jerk, this was a bunch of business students who were supposed to be coming up with a strategy for a
00:36:50.040
company. And so when he was a jerk, he'd sit there and somebody would suggest an idea and he would say,
00:36:56.000
have you ever taken a business course before? You know, just really belittle them. And when he was
00:37:02.360
a slacker, he just like put his head down on the, you know, he'd just sit back and, and, and look at
00:37:07.380
his phone and do it. And then when he was a downer, he would just like look so sad. He would, he would
00:37:12.940
get himself in the mood for the role by, by pretending his cat had died and he just put his head on the
00:37:20.000
table. And the interesting thing was that they found, you know, as they expected that putting this one
00:37:25.600
bad apple on the team would, would hurt his performance. And that did indeed happen. But
00:37:31.020
what really surprised the researchers was how contagious the behavior was that, you know,
00:37:36.300
that if they brought in the one jerk to work on the team, the other people started acting like
00:37:41.580
jerks too. And not just in retaliation against this one jerk, they started behaving badly toward each
00:37:46.920
other. When there was one slacker in there, pretty soon everyone was just, oh, whatever,
00:37:51.740
let's just get this over with. They started slacking off too. And when the downer was in
00:37:56.900
there, the other people would just start getting depressed too. And they go, what's the point of
00:38:00.400
this thing? So it's, you know, it's, it's, this bad behavior is very contagious. And it's,
00:38:07.260
it's more important when you're hiring people, when you're assembling the team to avoid bad apples and
00:38:13.520
get rid of them. If you have to, then it is to concentrate on hiring the absolute best person. I mean,
00:38:18.620
the power of bad is, you know, it's so powerful that it's, uh, that that's what determines how
00:38:25.700
well things will go. So a good enough employee might be like, yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean,
00:38:31.740
it's nice to get good ones, but you know, really just, you know, the bad apples are what will kill
00:38:35.820
you. And then the same thing in business where, you know, it's the unhappy customers who can really
00:38:41.780
do damage to you. You know, a one-star review hurts you much more than, you know, than a five-star
00:38:47.080
review helps you. And, and, and so you need to really focus on, on avoiding unhappy customers.
00:38:53.800
And, and that's more important than concentrating on the good ones. If you've got to focus,
00:38:58.720
make sure to avoid those unhappy ones. Well, let's end with talking about the place where
00:39:03.240
a lot of people feel, and there's been a lot written about this, um, that increases our negativity
00:39:08.100
bias or place to it. And we, you alluded to earlier, it's like the online world. First off,
00:39:12.460
I mean, is that, is it really true that like you see all these studies where, you know, being online
00:39:16.900
increases things like depression, anxiety, loneliness, et cetera. And, you know, people
00:39:22.160
write about that and say, you got to quit the internet because of this. Are those, is that really
00:39:26.440
true? Are we, is that a manifestation of our negativity bias? I think that's a manifestation
00:39:31.520
of, of, of journalist negativity bias because, you know, I'd heard that too. And I thought, yeah,
00:39:36.620
maybe, you know, it does make sense. And in fact, when writing this book, I thought, well,
00:39:39.620
this is another reason to write this book is we've got so much social media has just increased
00:39:44.380
the problems of the negativity effect. And I saw the studies, you know, about Instagram envy and
00:39:49.940
Facebook depression and, and, you know, people saying that more time you spent, the worse it was.
00:39:54.760
But then I started looking into it more. And what I found, you know, throughout my journalistic
00:39:58.320
career, I've always found, and we write in the book about what I call the crisis crisis, that
00:40:02.780
we're constantly inventing crises, that when you look into things, you see that, you know,
00:40:07.800
the scares don't pan out. And that was what I found about social media too, that when people
00:40:13.420
really looked at all the research, when they did meta-analyses of different studies, they found
00:40:18.240
that these, these, these problems like Facebook depression and Instagram envy were really overstated,
00:40:22.820
that yes, there are some people who, you know, who are affected, you know, you know, a woman who is,
00:40:29.020
is really concerned about her own weight, her own body image, who spends a lot of time looking at
00:40:33.840
these beautiful models on Instagram that can, you know, have some bad effects for it. But she
00:40:38.840
already had that problem to begin with. And, and, and, and for most people, it doesn't have that bad
00:40:44.040
effect. And, and, and then what the research shows is that, you know, for most people, you know, for,
00:40:50.020
you know, for young people worried about peer pressure, it's the people that they know in the
00:40:54.060
real world that really matter to them. It is, you know, the online world isn't bringing in all this
00:40:58.120
awful stuff. And the good news about social media is that people tend to be more positive on social
00:41:05.560
media than the mass media is. You know, I mean, I'm, you know, I've been a journalist all my life
00:41:10.260
and I'm what, you know, I call one of the merchants of bad because mass media, to attract a mass
00:41:16.180
audience, you go for those common things that everyone responds to. And most of them are bad.
00:41:22.300
You know, it's easy to, you know, we're all afraid of dying. We're all afraid of getting sick.
00:41:26.180
We're all afraid of being injured. So the easiest way to get a big audience to appeal to a lot of
00:41:31.140
people instantly is to scare them with something, is to exploit that negativity effect. Whereas
00:41:38.500
social media, now there are people on social media who do that or, you know, who, who, who spread a lot
00:41:44.040
of vitriol and we hear about all the flame wars and the vicious stuff that gets set on social media,
00:41:49.080
but that is not the norm. And what's nice about social media is that it, that it allows people
00:41:55.900
to concentrate on positive things. You know, the positive stuff that interests us tends to be
00:42:00.860
more idiosyncratic. We don't all have the same taste, you know, if we're interested in science
00:42:05.760
or history or psychology. So it's not so easy to get a mass audience appealing to those positive
00:42:13.400
interests, but social media lets you do that. You form your own group and, you know, you find a website,
00:42:18.780
you do that. I mean, you do podcasts like we're, you know, we're talking now for, you know, 45 minutes,
00:42:23.440
an hour about positive stuff, mostly about how to make life better. And we're not scaring people
00:42:29.280
about, did you hear about the latest terrorist attack? Did you hear about the latest outrage
00:42:33.900
that the other political party did? We're talking about science, you know, positive things, scientific
00:42:39.300
research and, and how to make life better. And there's just so much of that on social media and
00:42:44.660
there, and we cite in, in the power of bad, we cite, you know, the research showing that people tend to
00:42:50.320
spread positive things more than negative things on social media. Um, they share positive news stories.
00:42:56.300
They, they don't send a lot of pictures of playground massacres of their friends. They send
00:43:00.840
beautiful pictures of nature. They share stories about, you know, new advances in science, new,
00:43:07.180
you know, new, um, new books that they like, new theories that they've heard. Um, and there's,
00:43:14.000
there's research also that on Twitter, that people who tweet positively tend to get more followers and
00:43:20.900
that positive tweets actually get spread more widely. Now the negative tweets get retweeted very
00:43:26.660
quickly, you know, more quickly. And you have that phenomenon where suddenly everyone's piling on
00:43:31.100
something. There's this mass outrage, but in general, it's the positive stuff that travels farther
00:43:37.960
that gets retweeted more often. So in that sense, uh, you know, we're hopeful about the future because I
00:43:43.300
think as people learn to follow this low bad diet, if you curate your social media feed, if you go to
00:43:49.000
the, you know, the right websites, if you follow the right people and have the right friends, people
00:43:54.320
who share positive stuff, if you follow that rule of four and try and get four uplifting things for
00:44:00.220
every downer, um, you'll get a much more accurate view of the world. And I mean, you'll see how much,
00:44:06.280
how much is going right in the world. And, and, and that's much better than, than sitting around
00:44:11.780
thinking that the world's going to hell. You know, one of the, the saddest things that I see today is
00:44:16.540
that virtually every measure of human welfare is improving. You know, we are the luckiest people
00:44:23.880
in history that there's never been a better time to be alive. And yet the richer we get, the healthier
00:44:30.420
we get, um, the more gloomy we get about the world. And it's, it's very strange in international
00:44:37.600
surveys. When you ask people, you know, uh, how optimistic they are about the future,
00:44:41.740
it is people in, in rich countries like the United States who have it better than anyone else in
00:44:47.480
history, who are the most pessimistic. Whereas people in poor countries, they, you know, they're
00:44:52.720
more realistic. They realize how much life has gotten better for them. Whereas the people in the United
00:44:57.960
States, we, we have it so, uh, we have it so good that we have time to, to basically think about it,
00:45:03.880
to come up with all these first world problems and, and convince ourselves to, you know, that things
00:45:08.500
are awful. You know, there's an old saying, no food, one problem, much food, many problems. And we
00:45:16.160
just have a luxury to worry about lots of things. And, and it's fine to worry about problems because
00:45:21.080
when we address problems, you know, we come up with solutions, but we need to keep our perspective
00:45:25.780
that things are getting better for, for, for most people in the world. And there's a lot more good
00:45:31.420
going on than bad. Well, John, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:45:36.140
more about the book and your work? Um, they can, uh, uh, the book is called The Power of Bad, How the
00:45:41.180
Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. Um, it's by, it's published by Penguin Press. I've got
00:45:47.060
a website, JohnTierneyNYC.com. Penguin Random House has got a website for it. And, uh, um, uh, and I guess
00:45:56.800
that I'd have to say, you know, the book's available at, uh, at your bookstore and at Amazon. I hope
00:46:01.640
people buy it. And I, and I hope that, you know, people will use the book to, to, you know, to, to,
00:46:06.400
you know, to harness the power of bad when it's useful and overcome it when it's not useful.
00:46:12.800
Well, John Tierney, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:46:16.940
My guest today was John Tierney. He's the coauthor of the book, The Power of Bad. It's available on
00:46:20.900
Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his
00:46:24.460
website, JohnTierneyNYC.com. Also check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Power of Bad.
00:46:30.180
We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:46:40.120
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:46:43.640
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00:46:47.440
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00:46:51.040
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00:47:20.440
this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.