Example: confidence

Bad Is Stronger Than Good - University of Minnesota

Review of General Psychology2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370 Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation1089-2680/O1 DOI: Is Stronger Than GoodRoy F. Baumeister and Ellen BratslavskyCase Western Reserve UniversityCatrin FinkenauerFree University of AmsterdamKathleen D. VohsCase Western Reserve UniversityThe greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major lifeevents ( , trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interper-sonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedbackhave more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughlythan good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue goodones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant todisconfirmation than good ones.

Free University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Ellen Bratslavsky in now at the Department of Psychol-ogy, Ohio State University. We thank the many people who have contributed helpful comments and references. This work is dedicated to the memory of Warren. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-

Tags:

  Free

Information

Domain:

Source:

Link to this page:

Please notify us if you found a problem with this document:

Other abuse

Transcription of Bad Is Stronger Than Good - University of Minnesota

1 Review of General Psychology2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370 Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation1089-2680/O1 DOI: Is Stronger Than GoodRoy F. Baumeister and Ellen BratslavskyCase Western Reserve UniversityCatrin FinkenauerFree University of AmsterdamKathleen D. VohsCase Western Reserve UniversityThe greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major lifeevents ( , trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interper-sonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedbackhave more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughlythan good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue goodones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant todisconfirmation than good ones.

2 Various explanations such as diagnosticity and sa-lience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still foundwhen such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power ofgood) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is Stronger thangood, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological of literary efforts and religiousthought have depicted human life in terms of astruggle between good and bad forces. At themetaphysical level, evil gods or devils are theopponents of the divine forces of creation andharmony. At the individual level, temptationand destructive instincts battle against strivingsfor virtue, altruism, and fulfillment. "Good" and"bad" are among the first words and conceptslearned by children (and even by house pets),and most people can readily characterize almostany experience, emotion, or outcome as good form does this eternal conflict take inpsychology?

3 The purpose of this article is toreview evidence pertaining to the general hy-Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen , Department of Psychology, Case Western ReserveUniversity; Catrin Finkenauer, Department of Psychology, free University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Bratslavsky in now at the Department of Psychol-ogy, Ohio State thank the many people who have contributed helpfulcomments and references. This work is dedicated to thememory of concerning this article should be ad-dressed to Roy F. Baumeister or Kathleen D. Vohs, Depart-ment of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University ,10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7123. Elec-tronic mail may be sent to either that bad is Stronger than good (see alsoRozin & Royzman, in press).

4 That is, eventsthat are negatively valenced ( , losingmoney, being abandoned by friends, and receiv-ing criticism) will have a greater impact on theindividual than positively valenced events ofthe same type ( , winning money, gainingfriends, and receiving praise). This is not to saythat bad will always triumph over good, spellingdoom and misery for the human race. Rather,good may prevail over bad by superior force ofnumbers: Many good events can overcome thepsychological effects of a single bad one. Whenequal measures of good and bad are present,however, the psychological effects of bad onesoutweigh those of the good ones. This may infact be a general principle or law of psycholog-ical phenomena, possibly reflecting the innatepredispositions of the psyche or at least reflect-ing the almost inevitable adaptation of eachindividual to the exigencies of daily pattern has already been recognized incertain research domains.

5 This is probably mosttrue in the field of impression formation, inwhich the positive-negative asymmetry effecthas been repeatedly confirmed ( , Anderson,1965; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; Skowronski& Carlston, 1989). In general, and apart from afew carefully crafted exceptions, negative infor-mation receives more processing and contrib-323324 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS utes more strongly to the final impression thandoes positive information. Learning somethingbad about a new acquaintance carries moreweight than learning something good, by other spheres, the effect seems present butnot recognized. For example, nearly every psy-chology textbook teaches that propinquitybreeds attraction. This conclusion is based onthe landmark study by Festinger, Schachter, andBack (1950) in which the formation of friend-ships in a married students' dormitory wastracked over time.

6 Contrary to elaborate hypoth-eses about similarity, role complementarity,values, and other factors, the strongest predictorof who became friends was physical propin-quity: Participants who lived closest to eachother were most likely to become a lesser known follow-up by Ebbesen,Kjos, and Konecni (1976) found that propin-quity predicted the formation of disliking evenmore strongly than liking. Living near one an-other increased the likelihood that two peoplewould become enemies even more strongly thanit predicted the likelihood that they would be-come friends. Propinquity thus does not causeliking. More probably, it simply amplifies theeffect of other variables and events. Becausebad events are Stronger than good ones, anidentical increase in propinquity produces moreenemies than relative strength of bad may also berelevant to the topics studied by research psy-chologists.

7 As president of the American Psy-chological Association, Martin Seligman (1999)called for a "positive psychology" movement tooffset the negative focus that he saw as domi-nating most of psychology's history. The nega-tive focus was first documented by Carlson's(1966) survey of psychology textbooks, inwhich he found twice as many chapters (121 ) devoted to unpleasant as to pleasant emo-tions, and a similar imbalance was found inlines of coverage and use of specific recently, Czapinski (1985) coded morethan 17,000 research articles in psychologyjournals and found that the coverage of negativeissues and phenomena exceeded positive, goodones 69% to 31%, a bias that was fairly strongacross all areas of psychology (although weak-est in social psychology).

8 Seligman is probablyquite right in proposing that psychologists havefocused most of their theoretical and empiricalefforts on understanding the bad rather than has this been so? Undoubtedly, onehypothesis might be that psychologists are pes-simistic misanthropes or sadists who derive per-verse satisfaction from studying human suffer-ing and failure. An alternative explanation,however, would be that psychology has con-sisted of young researchers trying to obtain pub-lishable findings in a relatively new science thatwas characterized by weak measures and highvariance. They needed to study the strongestpossible effects in order for the truth to shinethrough the gloom of error variance and toregister on their measures. If bad is strongerthan good, then early psychologists would in-evitably gravitate toward studying the negativeand troubled side of human life, whereas themore positive phenomena had to wait until therecent emergence of Stronger methods, moresensitive measures, and better goal of this review is to draw together theasymmetrical effects of bad and good across adeliberately broad range of phenomena.

9 Even intopic areas in which this asymmetry has beenrecognized (as in impression formation), re-searchers have not generally linked it to patternsin other topic areas and may therefore haveoverlooked the full extent of its generality. Thepresent investigation is intended to providesome perspective on just how broadly valid it isthat bad is Stronger than good. We certainly donot intend to claim that the greater power of badthings overrides all other principles of psychol-ogy. Other relevant phenomena may includecongruency effects (good goes with good; badgoes with bad) and self-aggrandizing patterns(bad can be avoided or transformed into good).Nevertheless, the general principle that bad isstronger than good may have important impli-cations for human psychology and implies rendering one concept interms of others, and the most fundamental onestherefore will resist satisfactory , bad, and strength are among the mostuniversal and fundamental terms ( , Cassirer,1955; Osgood & Tzeng, 1990), and it could beargued that they refer to concepts that are un-derstood even by creatures with minimal lin-guistic capacity (such as small children andeven animals).

10 By good we understand desir-able, beneficial, or pleasant outcomes includingBAD IS Stronger THAN GOOD325states or consequences. Bad is the opposite:undesirable, harmful, or unpleasant. Strengthrefers to the causal impact. To say that bad isstronger than good is thus to say that bad thingswill produce larger, more consistent, more mul-tifaceted, or more lasting effects than Brief Discussion: Why Should Bad BeStronger Than Good?Offering an explanation for the greater powerof bad than good is likely to be an inherentlydifficult enterprise. The very generality of thepattern entails that there are likely to be fewprinciples that are even more broad and , researchers will have found lowerlevel explanations that help explain why badmay be Stronger than good with regard to spe-cific, narrowly defined our perspective, it is evolutionarilyadaptive for bad to be Stronger than good.


Related search queries