Yes And vs. the Negativity Bias

Rule Number One for the performance improviser and the Daily Improviser is Yes And – that is, accept the offers of your fellow players and contribute something that advances the action. For the Daily Improviser, this doesn’t necessarily mean Agreeing with the Position put forth by your “partner,” but it does mean:

• Accepting the Person,
• Acknowledging the Possibilities in what he says, and
• Advancing with Positive Purpose.

For the Daily Improviser, though, it can often seem as if every positive impulse you put forth into the world is met by a battery of “No’s” pushing back. And this experience may not be just a product of your imagination, as Jonathan Haidt points out in his book The Happiness Hypothesis.

Haidt, one of the foremost scholars in the area of Positive Psychology, refers to a psychological tendency called the Negativity Bias, which can be simply stated as: For most people, bad is stronger than good. This is not a value judgment but a reflection of psychologists’ repeated finding that the human mind tends to react to bad things more quickly, forcefully, and persistently than to equivalent good things.

To illustrate the Negativity Bias in action, Haidt points to the following research examples:

• In marital interactions, it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act
• In financial transactions and gambles, the pleasure of gaining a certain amount of money is smaller than the pain of losing the same amount
• In evaluating a person’s character, people estimate that it would take 25 acts of life-saving heroism to make up for one act of murder

(To demonstrate the Negativity Bias yourself, you can conduct your own unscientific study – just turn on the next installment of the evening news.)

The existence of the Negativity Bias sounds pretty depressing and negativity-inducing in itself, right? Well, I think this is another situation that calls for the application of the Stockdale Paradox: Confront the brutal facts, yet never lose faith!  You need to recognize the disproportionate strength of "No" in order to avoid being blindsided by the power it wields in the world.  Yet you also want to maintain your faith in the power of Yes And and be sure to cultivate, nurture, and repeatedly put its positivity principles into effect as a remedy for the “No” disease.

Next time I'll talk a bit more about becoming aware of the impact of the Negativity Bias on your own thinking and attitudes.