Okay, so you got a new sweater. It looks great and you're getting tons of
compliments. But then just one person says something snarky about it and even
though you got all that praise you, can't help but stew over the negative
comment. Why is that? Why does our mind seem to dwell on the negative?
"A lot of my
research focuses on how people tend to get stuck in particular ways of thinking
and what enables them to get unstuck." Alison Ledgerwood is a psychology
professor at UC Davis. "I get to study how humans think and how we could maybe
think better." We all know the expression about seeing a glass as half-full or
half-empty. It isn't just what you see but how you
see it. And the way describe that glass to people can really change how they
feel about it. Alison wanted to know what happens when you try to switch your way
of thinking from the positive frame to the negative frame — or vice versa. Her
research team brought two groups of people into the lab and told them about
a new surgical procedure. Group one was told that the procedure has a 70%
success rate. For group two, they framed it as a 30 percent failure rate.
"It's the same exact procedure and they're giving you the exact same
information, but one doctor is focusing on the part of the class that's full and
the other doctor is focusing on the part of the class that's empty." So, no surprise:
People like the procedure when it's described in positive terms and they
don't like it when you focus on the failure rate, but then the researchers
pointed it out to the first group that you could also think of the procedure as
failing 30% of the time. Suddenly people didn't like it anymore. And when they
tried a similar thing with group two, pointing out that the procedure had a
70% success rate, people didn't change their mind. "And over and over again in
studies like that we find that people seem to get stuck in the negative way of
thinking about it and it's hard for them to flip and focus on the positive." So
once you frame something negatively, it really sticks. "It makes sense from an
evolutionary or functional perspective that our minds are built to look for
negative information in the environment and to hold on to it once we find it."
Imagine your prehistoric ancestors. You don't want to forget that there might be
a predator lurking around. "In many situations, we want our minds to be
grabbed by the negative information so that we can fix problems when they're
there." But then there are other situations, where we want to get over
some small imperfection or a bit of bad news, when it's not helpful to fixate
on the negative. What do we do then? "what I really take away from this research
for my own life is that it's difficult to see the upside and that it takes work,
literally, that we have to put effort into looking at the bright side of
things. So we can't assume that our mind is just going to do that automatically
and that it's very easy to just keep tilting back towards the negatives." And
this is something you can counteract with practice. Like, spending a few
minutes each day thinking about the things you're grateful for. Doing this
regularly can help it become a habit. And it turns out that this negative bias can
change over time. Remember when you were younger and any bad experience
felt like the end of the world? "So this kind of pervasive negativity bias starts
to diminish and so in our research we've we find that the stickiness of a
negative frame seems to disappear entirely by the time people are in their
seventies. They seem to flow back and forth between negatives and positives
much more easily." So maybe that's something we can all be grateful for — that
there are actually some good things about getting older. How do you get out
of negative ways of thinking? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to
check out our other video all about the teenage brain. Remembering all the things
you did as a teenager might make you cringe but neuroscientists are learning
that some of the most puzzling teenage behavior may actually serve an
evolutionary purpose.