Today is the 3228 day that Jingdu will accompany you in your lifelong growth.
In "Not a List: Things are accomplished not because of what you do, but because of what you don't do", Jingdu mentioned that you should think in reverse, use list thinking, and list " Instead of making a list, we are better equipped to do something and not do something.
One reason why the "not-for-list" works is because of the asymmetry of the do-and-don'ts. Doing something may not necessarily increase the probability of success; not doing something that will lead to failure can actually increase the probability of success.
This asymmetry is very common. One typical manifestation is negativity bias: Compared with positive information, people are more sensitive to negative information and more likely to overreact.
What are the specific manifestations of negative bias? How to deal with it? Regarding these issues, readers can refer to the entry "1741: Negative Bias" in the Jingdujun General Knowledge Dictionary. The full text is attached, I hope you can gain something from it.
intensive reading
"1741: Negative Bias"
forward thinking
Please review the material about loss aversion in endowment effect , and think: What inspiration does this give you?
Loss aversion refers to the asymmetric sensitivity of most people to losses and gains. The pain of loss is much greater than the happiness of gain.
Suppose there is such a gambling game. Toss an even coin. The head is a win and the tail is a loss. If you win, you can get 50,000 yuan, and if you lose, you lose 50,000 yuan. Are you willing to take a gamble?
A, willing
B, unwilling
On the whole, the probability of winning or losing in this bet is the same, which is absolutely fair. However, a large number of similar experimental results prove that most people are unwilling to play this game.
The reason is that people are more sensitive to "loss" than "gain". Thinking about the possibility of losing 50,000 yuan is more uncomfortable than thinking about the possibility of winning 50,000 yuan.
research found that if you want to balance the possible loss of 100 yuan, you need to get a minimum profit of generally around 200 yuan, which is twice the loss.
In other words, in the above gambling game, if you lose 50,000 yuan, the winning amount is generally set at more than 100,000 yuan, so most people will be willing to play this game. Therefore, economist Samuelson said: The utility brought by an increase of 100 yuan is less than the utility brought by the loss of 100 yuan.
Psychologists Kahneman and others once designed a very interesting experiment to explain the "endowment effect" through buying and selling prices.
They asked the first group (sellers) of subjects to first receive a coffee cup and then answer the lowest price they were willing to sell the cup for.
The second group (buyers) did not have a cup in advance and had to answer how much they were willing to pay to buy the cup.
The third group (choosers) could choose whether to receive a cup or a sum of money (their choice indicated that the money was just as attractive as getting the cup).
We would think that there should not be much difference in the prices they gave, but the result is: $7.12 for the seller, $3.12 for the selector, and $2.87 for the buyer.
The seller prices the cup, which is about twice the price set by the selector and buyer. This 2:1 ratio has been repeatedly verified by many experiments. In other words, people think that the value of the same thing is not equal, that is, giving up pain is stronger than getting the same thing to gain happiness.
Q1: What is negativity bias?
A:
1, Negativity bias (Negativity bias), also known as Negativity bias , refers to:
Compared with positive information, people are more sensitive to negative information and more likely to overreact.
For example, in the preliminary thinking, it was mentioned that the gambling game of tossing even coins has the same probability of winning and losing, which is absolutely fair. The gain and loss of the bet are both 50,000 yuan, but most people are not willing to play.
The reason is that most people have loss aversion, that is, loss aversion psychology. When faced with a sense of loss, they must significantly exceed the same amount to gain happiness. For the same amount, being more sensitive to losses is a manifestation of negative bias. The information weights of
2 and are different from .
Different information has different weights, some information is more important, and some information is more secondary. This truth is easy to understand and not difficult to accept.
The problem is whether the information weighting is accurate and appropriate. Underestimating important information and overestimating secondary information can easily lead to misjudgments, which can lead to wrong decisions.
In this process, the most difficult thing to deal with is not recognizing that you have made a mistake. Taking negative bias as an example, the person concerned may not be aware that he or she has a systemic bias, and is prone to overestimating the weight of negative information, being overly sensitive, and overreacting.
For example, "being bitten by a snake once", this negative experience makes people excessively frightened, leading to "ten years of fear of well ropes". This overreaction may result in parties being unable to take reasonable risks and missing out on opportunities that could have been taken.
Today’s entry, Jingdujun introduces negative bias for readers’ reference to reduce information processing bias.
Q2: How to understand negativity bias?
A:
1, test history .
The study of different processing preferences for negative and positive information began with psychologist and 2002 Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.
In 1983, he proposed the concept of "loss aversion" to describe his research findings: We regret losses more than we enjoy benefits. For example, the feeling of loss when losing 100 yuan is always greater than the feeling of happiness when picking up an extra 100 yuan.
As shown in the diagram above, the X-axis is the final result and actual output; the Y-axis is the "cognitive value" of the result in people's minds.
From A to B or A to C, the x-axis changes the same (that is, the actual output changes are the same), but people have a big cognitive gap in the cognitive value of the results of such changes, A to C (y-axis) Change, greater than the change from A to B (y-axis).
A large number of experiments have shown that this multiple difference is about 2 times. It is mentioned in the preliminary thinking that if you want to balance the possible loss of 100 yuan, you need to get a minimum profit of generally around 200 yuan, which is twice the loss. In other words, the happiness of picking up an extra 200 yuan can offset the feeling of loss of losing 100 yuan.
Later, psychologists further expanded on Kahneman's findings and found that Kahneman's findings existed in more fields, and then proposed the concept of negative bias. Among them, two important studies were published in 2001.
The first research paper is "Bad is More Powerful than Good," by psychologists Roy Baumister, Ellen Brazlavsky, Katherine Foss, and Catrien · Finkenauer.
They summarized related research and concluded: "We found that bad events have greater influence than good events in daily events, major life events (such as trauma), relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes."
The second research paper is "Negativity Bias, Negative Dominance, and Contagion" by psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Roizman.
They argue: "Compared with positive events, negative events are more prominent, more powerful, more dominant in the event mix, and generally more effective."
Let's look at two examples. The first example was given by Luo Zin’s team. For example, witnessing a cockroach often makes us turn away from food; if you don't like celery, coriander, etc., it's difficult to offset the disgust by adding something to it.
In other words, a little negative factor can make people completely careless about whether things are good or bad overall. Just like the law of wine and sewage , a spoonful of sewage ruins a barrel of wine, and a grain of mouse droppings ruins a pot of soup.
The second example was given by the Baumeister team. For a long time, psychology journals and textbooks have devoted more than twice as much space discussing psychological issues as discussing happiness.
The reason is that in order to obtain statistically significant results, psychological researchers "need to study the strongest possible effects so that the truth can shine through the shadow of the error variance and be reflected in the measurement results." Because of "bad" Stronger than "good", early psychologists tended to study the problematic side of human life.
And so on, negative bias is pervasive in every field, attracting attention that is disproportionate to its importance.
2, explore attribution .
The typical manifestation of negative bias is that because of negative experiences or fear of negative events, the impact is far greater than neutral experiences or even positive experiences. As a result, humans tend to behave in ways that avoid negative experiences and are more likely to recall and be affected by past negative experiences.
In other words, we are more likely to recall negative events and comments than positive ones, and negative events and comments will have a deeper impact on us.
This is not only true for individuals, but also at the social level. If readers pay attention, they will find that there are more negative events in media reports and receive more attention, which can easily make people misjudge the probability of occurrence and lead to wrong decisions.
For example, in the availability bias, Jingdujun mentioned that the media often reports on "incidents of helping the elderly but being blackmailed", which makes many people afraid to help the elderly.
In fact, the probability of being "blackmailed" is very small. Precisely because the probability is small and it is a negative event, it is easier to be reported. What is more common is "helping the elderly without being blackmailed", which is not a very positive event, but close to a neutral event, with a high probability. If it is too common, it will not be reported, because the reporter knows that no one will read the report.
Since it is so easy to make mistakes, why is negativity bias so common and so deeply rooted?
For example, in life, most people will spend more energy to avoid negative evaluations than to build positive evaluations; in emotions, most people will spend more time resolving negative emotions than reminiscing about good moments.
In fact, even if they understand negativity bias, most people will instinctively be overly sensitive and overreact to negative information. In this regard, psychologists have explored attribution and conducted many experiments.
For example, in a 1998 study, researcher Ito and his team showed pictures to 33 participants and measured their brain electrical activity to study their reactions.
Some of the pictures are emotionally neutral (sockets, plates, etc.), some are emotionally positive (people enjoying a roller coaster, etc.), and some are emotionally negative (guns pointed at the camera, mutilated faces, etc.).
The results of the study showed that when participants saw negative pictures, there were more event-related potentials or activity in the brain than when they saw positive pictures.
Similarly, in a 2001 study, researchers Auman, Lundquist and others presented various emotional faces with neutral faces as the background. The results of the study show, as shown in the graphic below, that threat face recognition is faster and more accurate.
Other studies show that even babies as young as 6 months old can easily spot an angry face in a crowd, but they have a much harder time picking out a happy face.
readers who pay attention may also find that no matter how many smiling faces there are in the crowd, we will immediately focus on the angry faces.
Neuropsychologist Rick Hansen pointed out that the organ that helps us recognize facial expressions is located in the amygdala, a part of the brain area. Two-thirds of the neurons in the amygdala are specially equipped for negative news so that we can respond quickly and store it in long-term memory.
This mechanism is the basis of our "fight or flight" stress response: it is a survival instinct that quickly uses memory to analyze threats. By comparison, it takes a full 12 seconds for good news to move from temporary memory to long-term memory.
In other words, studies such as this show that we pay more attention to negative stimuli and respond faster.Psychologists believe that this negative bias can be understood from an evolutionary perspective and is of great value to maintaining human survival.
"Life" must be done continuously every day, and "death" only needs to be completed once. If you miss the positive information, you may regret it, but you will not worry about your life; but if the negative information that threatens your survival is not dealt with properly once, you may not be able to survive.
Comparing the two, it is not difficult to understand that negative bias is a biological instinctive cognitive tendency. Even if a lot of negative information is not that important and the threat is not great, organisms are prone to being overly sensitive and overreacting.
For example, if you see a snake-like stick, you will instinctively jump away. As for whether it is a real snake or a fake snake, it doesn't matter whether you will fall into a trap or land safely after jumping away.
In the early days of human development, negative bias was of great significance to human survival and reproduction; in modern society, due to changes in circumstances, although negative bias is still valuable, its value has decreased. If not handled properly, you may suffer the consequences.
3, recognition corresponds to .
Negative bias manifests itself in many aspects, and it is not difficult for readers to find out if they pay a little attention.
For example, we prefer ads that arouse fear compared to those that emphasize growth; compared with reports that emphasize truth, goodness and beauty, we prefer dramatic negative reports such as good people turning bad; compared with statements that emphasize the complexity of international relations, we prefer Preference for speech that simply emphasizes conflict and confrontation...
In fact, descriptions such as "I am born to lose myself" and "negative energy addiction" reflect the universality of negative prejudice.
Negativity bias is also typical in language. For example, about two-thirds of English words contain negative connotations. When it comes to words used to describe people, this proportion reaches 74%. Take pain and happiness as an example. There are many synonyms for pain, far greater than the number of synonyms for happiness.
and so on, negative bias is widespread and has a significant impact, and needs to be dealt with carefully.
must be identified first before it can be managed. To deal with negativity bias, we must first strengthen our recognition of the asymmetry in processing negative information and positive information to see if we are overly sensitive and overreactive to negative information.
For example, in daily life, we experience many things every day, some are good, some are bad, and some are neither good nor bad. If you feel that you often encounter bad things, you should remind yourself whether you are affected by negative bias, pay too much attention to the bad things, and ignore other things. thing.
For example, in interpersonal relationships, friends help each other. If one party receives help many times but takes it for granted, and becomes angry when rejected once, this may also be a case of negative bias, paying too much attention to rejections and ignoring the number of acceptances.
For example, in performance feedback, if you write an article and post it on the Internet, readers who like it may just like it or even do nothing, and readers who don't like it may leave negative comments; if the author falls into a negative bias, he will only pay attention to the comments, especially the negative comments. , it is possible to misjudge the quality of the article. After
strengthens the recognition, we can respond in a targeted manner. Taking intimate relationships as an example, realizing that negative impressions have a significant impact, it is necessary to reduce the number of negative events as much as possible. Because negative bias will lead to doing one wrong thing, it will take N good things to make up for it.
The N here varies with the situation. As mentioned above, in Kahneman's loss aversion study, when it comes to money, twice the amount is needed to balance the negative bias; in psychologist John Gottman 's study of marital relationships, if you want to be happy for a long time, both parties must have positive interactions rather than negative interactions. 5 times.
Regardless of whether N is large or small, we will be more cautious after understanding that "bad things" require paying N times the price. Of course, we also need to be moderately tolerant of people who make mistakes. Due to negative bias, we may be too harsh on them.
This is true for individuals, and it is also true for businesses. For example, the Indian subsidiary of Cadbury encountered a crisis in October 2003, during the peak chocolate sales season. Mumbai Some consumers complained that bugs were found in Cadbury chocolate bars. The Indian government announced an investigation and the media reported a sharp decline in Cadbury's sales.
Cadbury's investigation revealed that the problem lay with improper storage by retailers who had no affiliation with Cadbury. Cadbury executives were well aware of the negativity bias and realized that this good news could not overcome the negative press.
As a result, Cadbury launched the "Trust Plan" and took multiple measures to offset the negative impression of consumers.
introduced foil-lined "clean and airtight" chocolate packaging, provided retailers with metal containers and freezers for storing chocolate, and then promoted these initiatives vigorously, holding press conferences, touring India, issuing videos and press releases, and sponsoring TV children Quiz shows and advertisements in newspapers in 11 languages.
also spent huge sums of money to invite movie star Amitabh Bachchan, one of the most trustworthy in consumer surveys, to do TV ads. In the ad, Bachchan visits a Cadbury factory to inspect new packaging and assures his granddaughter that the candy is safe.
’s multi-pronged offensive finally overwhelmed the negative public opinion, and Cadbury’s sales also stopped falling and rebounded.
It is worth noting that the world is very complex, and we will have both negative and optimistic biases. It is easy to ignore negative information, be overly optimistic, and be overconfident.
These two types of prejudices are completely opposite. They are both common and have significant impacts, and both require us to strengthen their identification. Interestingly, both types of bias can appear in the same person, but the tendency is different in different situations.
For example, one of the variables is time. Some people are more likely to have a negative bias for recent events, pay too much attention to negative events, and feel unlucky; for long-term events, they are more likely to have an optimistic bias, forget negative events, and feel happy.
and so on, we need to strengthen identification to see where our cognitive biases are, and then make targeted adjustments to avoid significant imbalances.
For example, in the field of investment, Buffett said that "being greedy when others are fearful" is also using negative bias to create value. When most people are overly sensitive and overreactive to market corrections and declines due to negative biases, and Buffett follows his own investment principles and judges that asset prices are undervalued and it is a time to buy, he will show "greed" and go against what most people do. .
Similarly, Oaktree Capital Howard Marks invested approximately US$500 million in distressed debt every week for 15 weeks during the last 15 weeks of the financial market crash in 2008. At that time, many people believed that the end of the world had arrived, but Howard said, "Obviously, everyone is panicking, but in general, this is an excellent time to buy." Because of this calm operation, Oaktree Capital earned tens of billion dollar profit.
At the end of the entry, I would like to remind you that it is weighted.
Things have different importance. Since "bad" is usually more powerful than "good", when processing negative information and positive information, we also need to allocate processing resources according to weight. Asymmetric factors, which have asymmetric mechanisms, must also be dealt with asymmetrically.
Post-thought:
① What negative bias phenomena have you observed?
② How do you judge which side of your bias is biased?
