Sabotaging the Seesaw: Overcoming Negativity Bias

Thinking about how to achieve emotional balance

Photo: Gregory Garretson

If you are anything like me, you probably find that sometimes you don’t feel as happy as seems to be warranted. The emotional makeup of humans is a peculiar beast. It is difficult to tame and behaves in ways that surprise. In this essay, I don’t aspire to offer any groundbreaking analyses or solutions, but what I would like to do is to think a bit with you about the problem of unhappiness, specifically as regards one particular tendency that we humans suffer from, that which has been termed “negativity bias”. I hope to start a discussion about your experiences; I’d like to hear about ways you have found to deal with this characteristically human conundrum.

Psychologists use the term negativity bias to refer to humans’ apparent preference for noticing and thinking about negative rather than positive things.¹ Here is one explanation:

Negativity bias refers to our proclivity to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” (Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008, p. 383). We can think of it as an asymmetry in how we process negative and positive occurrences to understand our world, one in which “negative events elicit more rapid and more prominent responses than non-negative events” (Carretié, Mercado, Tapia, & Hinojosa., 2001, p. 75).²

This cognitive bias shows up in many different ways, from the preponderance of negative news in journalism to people’s tendency to make decisions so as to minimize risk rather than to maximize gain, as famously studied by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.³ According to Rozin and Royzman (2001), negative information (as compared to positive information) is more salient, seems to worsen as it approaches in time, engages the brain more thoroughly, and leads to whole situations seeming more negative than the sum of their parts.⁴ Here, I am interested specifically in the effects of negativity bias on our affective state.

Now, you may be wondering whether this has anything to do with living in a foreign culture, which is the purported topic of this substack. Actually, it does, in at least two ways.

First, there is the fact that negativity bias causes people to emphasize potential risks over potential gains. I know from reading the comments on these essays that there are many people (especially in the USA) who have become unhappy with their lives in their home country and are thinking about moving somewhere else. But most of these people will not do so. Why? Because they fear what they would lose more than they desire what they would gain. This is negativity bias in its full glory.

Second, those who actually do move abroad will quickly run into situations that are challenging and stressful—I have written about this in many different essays at this point.⁵ It is easy to become disillusioned with your new life when it turns out to be harder than you expected. This can also be a case of negativity bias in action—possibly in conjunction with the Security person vs. Discovery person distinction that I have posited. So I think that this is actually a very important topic for migrants to consider.

But right now what I want to do is talk about seesaws.

Most of us probably had the experience as children of playing on a seesaw, also known in some regions as a “teeter-totter”—not to be confused with Tater Tots. (Actually, wouldn’t it truly be totally titillating to see a toddler—or a teetotaler—on a teeter-totter eating Tater Tots?⁶ That would make my linguistic day.) I want to pull the seesaw out of the playground and use it as a metaphor. This, and a bit of elementary physics, will help us to think through the problem of negativity bias in a nicely systematic way.

Diagram: Gregory Garretson

Consider this diagram, which represents your emotional state. The seesaw is shown here with red and green zones, with the red representing negativity and the green representing positivity. When something positive happens to you, it can be conceptualized as a weight placed on the left side of the seesaw, causing that end to go down and the other to rise into the green zone—meaning that you feel good. Conversely, a negative event is represented by a weight placed on the right side, causing the seesaw to rise into the red zone—the zone of bad feelings.

We are also going to need to use a couple of terms from physics. For example, do you remember what the point under the middle of the seesaw is called? Let’s do a poll.

OK, here is where negativity bias comes into the picture. We have said that experiencing a positive event is represented by placing a weight on the seesaw to the left of the fulcrum (yes, that’s the right word), and experiencing a negative event means placing a weight to the right of the fulcrum. But here’s the thing: if you experience two events that are exactly equal in significance (say, winning ten dollars or losing ten dollars), the negative weight will be placed farther from the fulcrum, out toward the end of the seesaw. This means that the negative event will outweigh the positive event, and your emotional state will end up in the red zone. This has been shown scientifically in many studies—they just didn’t have the cool seesaw diagram to illustrate it.

Diagram: Gregory Garretson

Now that we understand the problem and have a metaphor for exploring it, let’s see what that metaphor can teach us.

Using what we know from our playground experience and/or our knowledge of physics, we can see that there are at least five ways to try to combat the problem of negativity bias. Let’s list them briefly and then go through them in more detail:

• We could place the negative weights closer to the fulcrum, decreasing their effect.

• We could place the positive weights farther from the fulcrum, increasing their effect.

• We could go find more positive weights to add to the left side of the seesaw.

• We could knock the negative weights off the seesaw altogether.

• We could try to break the seesaw, or interfere with its ability to tilt.

All of these are techniques that people try, but I suspect that they vary a bit in their ease of implementation and ultimate effectiveness.

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Intermission: On the off-chance that I already had a photo of a see-saw, I searched my database for “seesaw”, and was given this picture:

Photo: Gregory Garretson

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a seesaw here. In fact, I’d say that what we have here is a “don’t-seesaw”. The fact that there is a nice big space in the foreground of the picture made me wonder whether it might be a photo of an invisible seesaw (which would be incredibly cool to play on), but when I searched my database for “invisible seesaw”, I got a white screen saying “No Results”. But of course that’s what you would get if it were invisible! Nothing is certain. Let us move on.

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Now it’s time to consider the five possible solutions to the problem of negativity bias.

Move the negative weights in

The first solution is to move the negative weights toward the fulcrum. What does this mean in psychological terms? It means not letting things bother you so much. Everyone knows (and it has been confirmed scientifically) that if you get three pieces of positive feedback and one piece of negative feedback, you will be more likely to pay attention to the negative feedback and dwell on it, even though it’s a small part of the total. Wouldn’t it be great if you could avoid getting fixated on the negative?

One solution that is often recommended is mindfulness exercises, which help to reduce automatic thinking in response to events. Unfortunately, these can be hard to do for people who have never practiced meditation. Less ambitious but perhaps more effective is to target negative self-talk, such as “I can’t believe I did that. What an idiot I am!” Do you have any self-critical voices in your head that reinforce the negativity of events? These are not your friends. I can honestly say that I have struggled for many years to reduce my negative self-talk, but it has really helped me.

Move the positive weights out

The second solution is to move the positive weights farther from the fulcrum, thus increasing their force. Psychologically, this means paying more attention to positive information. Going back to the situation in which you received three positive pieces and one negative piece of feedback, perhaps you should force yourself to spend some time focusing on the positive feedback—thinking about what you did to deserve it, and how you must look to the people who appreciated your actions. It is important to celebrate your victories, even when they are not total. In fact, I have written about my mantra of “tiny victories”, which helps me to get through the day. Did someone say your Substack piece was beautiful? Maybe you should re-read it, focusing on noticing the beauty that others have seen and congratulating yourself for doing a good job.

Because our brains have developed to process negative events with greater thoroughness than positive events, it can be very helpful to learn to savor positive events in an intentional way. A very good habit to develop is learning to notice when you are happy; thinking about the things that have made you feel that way and focusing on your positive mood can imprint it more firmly in your memory.

Find more positive weights

The third solution suggested by the seesaw metaphor is to find more positive weights to put on the left side of the seesaw. In psychological terms, this means looking for reasons to be happy. There are at least two ways to approach this.

One is to do things deliberately that you know will make you happy. If you are worried about the results of a medical test on a sunny day, going for a walk and enjoying the beauty of your surroundings can help tip the seesaw back toward the green zone. Giving yourself some other kind of treat, like an hour of reading or some chocolate, can also help to move the seesaw.

The other way to increase the positive weights is to work on your perceptions. The most widely recommended procedure for doing this is to focus on gratitude. Studies in positive psychology suggest that spending a short while thinking about all of the people and things you are grateful for can have a tremendous impact on your overall sense of happiness.

Lose the negative weights

Solution number four is to reduce the negative weights on the seesaw, simply knocking them off. This is probably the most difficult method. As I see it, there are two ways to approach it.

First, there is denial. Simply telling your brain not to process the negative information can possibly have a positive effect on your emotional state, but of course it comes at a cost. Some negative stimuli aren’t going to go away. People who avoid going to the doctor despite increasing symptoms usually do not end up recommending this method to others. A friend told me that he saw an interview with a dying rock musician who had waited to address his cancer until it was too late, and who said wryly, “That’s one phobia that didn’t pay off.”

Second, there is reframing. Are things really as bad as you think? Possibly the master of reframing is Eckhart Tolle, who, in his books The Power of Now and A New Earth, presents the provocative thesis that we really don’t have to worry about things, because nothing exists other than the present, and thus there is no need to conceptualize things as “problems”. As he writes in The Power of Now (p. 53):

[I]t is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now. A situation that needs to be either dealt with or accepted—yes. Why make it into a problem? Why make anything into a problem? Isn’t life challenging enough as it is? What do you need problems for? The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal, and it is insane. “Problem” means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action now and that you are unconsciously making it a part of your sense of self.

Admittedly, this is hard to pull off, but the potential for improving one’s emotional state is clearly immense.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

Sabotage the seesaw

Finally, we come to the most radical solution to the problem of negativity bias: to sabotage the seesaw. This means interfering with the mechanism so that it doesn’t obey the rules that it has obeyed thus far. I can see more radical and less radical ways of attempting to do this.

The most radical is probably the use of drugs. Why do people become addicts? Certainly not because it saves them money or wins them the esteem of society. People use drugs—and let’s be honest, that includes alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine—in order to make themselves feel better than they would without the drugs. I want to argue that this is different from putting positive weights on the seesaw, because it is not changing your surroundings or even the focus of your perception—it is changing your biochemistry, and thus working on your perception from behind, as it were.

A slightly different version of this method is the use of prescription drugs, such as anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. These are still drugs, but they are the ones that the medical profession recommends. Many people who have a natural biochemical imbalance find that such medications enable them to have a much more stable emotional life than they otherwise could, and thus see them as a lifesaver. But of course, there are drawbacks and side-effects. I have also known people who went off anti-depressants because they reduced the highs as well as the lows, and somehow seeing the seesaw entirely disabled was itself grief-inducing.

There is a less radical version of sabotaging the seesaw that I would recommend for almost everyone. That is, when you find yourself dwelling on negative information, to do something to shift your physical state. Physical exercise has an incredible tendency to improve one’s mood. So does dancing. Even listening to upbeat music can obliterate negative emotions. Happiness guru Gretchen Rubin says to “act the way you want to feel”, and suggests doing things like jumping (though presumably you don’t want to feel jumpy). What all of these techniques have in common is that they let your body take the lead and show your mind how to feel.

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At this point we have moved from “see” to “saw”, having fairly exhausted our metaphor. I have given a cursory overview of some of the methods proposed by others to counteract the negativity bias that threatens our emotional well-being. But what methods do you recommend? Here at Living Elsewhere, we have a community of engaged and interesting people, and I can see that we all have a lot to teach each other. So I look forward to the discussion.

See(saw) you soon!

1. Here are some useful sources of information on negativity bias:

https://positivepsychology.com/3-steps-negativity-bias/

https://www.verywellmind.com/negative-bias-4589618

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

2. Quote from https://positivepsychology.com/3-steps-negativity-bias/

3. https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Behavioral_Decision_Theory/Kahneman_Tversky_1979_Prospect_theory.pdf

4. That article is summarized nicely in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias.

5. Here are some essays that touch on the difficulties of living abroad:

Are You One of the Few Americans Who Really Could Move to Europe?

Do You Need to Fix Yourself Elsewhere?

How to Be a Good Immigrant

The Tension Between Home and Adventure

6. Read this aloud, I dare you.