The 7x Distortion: Negativity Bias Reconsidered
I’ve been struggling to make sense of our current dilemmas: political, systemic, structural, cultural, ecological, economic, scientific, spiritual… It seems like on every front we have a label for, there is either a manifest crisis or a looming crisis. Then I remember, usually briefly, that we are seven times more sensitive to negative stimuli (including media and our own thoughts) than we are to positive stimuli and I wonder, are these crises — assuming we could assign them a magnitude — more than seven times larger than their countervailing positive counterparts? I mean, it’s one thing to read the words “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” and another thing to look in the mirror and understand, not how things appear, but how things ARE. Let’s agree to call this the 7x distortion, a finding which research strongly indicates is a common feature of all DNA based life — us included.
I’ve read a lot of writing about perceptual bias, one thing that stands out to me is the highly consistent treatment of the 7x distortion: which can be summarized (plagiarized?) in the following common vignette, “Missing the queue for food costs little, missing the queue for a lethal predator costs the whole game.” This post-hoc rationalization for why we have the 7x distortion is so ubiquitously accepted that few authors, none that I’ve found, dig deeper into the assumptions underlying the theory or spread the analysis farther to discuss the impact of an unchallenged 7x distortion on contemporary human life — and the ever-present chain of pending catastrophes that characterize the unfolding of recorded human history.
One of the challenges in unpacking just how much impact the 7x distortion has on our perception lies in the fact that we are also, as a species, intuitively bad at math. If you happen to be in the thin part of the bell curve on mathematical ability, please don’t take offense, but research says: you’re still bad at math (objectively)… just better than most of your peers (subjectively). So here‘s’ a vignette to translate the math of 7x into a narrative parable — the kind of thinking at which humans excel: Research says (for the contemporary United States) that the income level you need for optimal emotional well-being is in the $60,000 — $75,000 per year range. When we put the 7x multiplier on that, we get salaries in the $400,000 to $500,000 per year range — does this help explain why many erroneously think that only C-Suite executives, celebrities, and yacht owners could possibly be happy?
We’ve heard talk of echo chambers, but let’s talk about how one is built. So, the media knows about this 7x bias — because they went to either business school or journalism school, and this is something that is taught in both of those places. So, we’re 7x more likely to have our media workers select negative news. But then, it is out there in the world and we give it 7x attention, again… that’s a 50x multiplier (okay 49x, but 50x is easier to grok). Then we’re freaked out enough to jump on social media and respond to it — now we’re in the zone where that negative news (third hand) is now at a 350x it’s original strength (for people reading our post). Comparatively, the relative power of good news diminishes, by the time it gets from news to us to social, its salience approaches 1/350th that of a parallel negative story.
So, if we’re seven times more sensitive to our mistakes than to our successes, seven times more sensitive to our worst moments, impulses, and motives — is it any wonder that generating self-compassion is so difficult? The same goes for others, if their faults — or at least the parts of them that rub us the wrong way — are seven times more salient than their strengths, is it any wonder that we struggle to maintain compassionate, harmonious relationships with others in our lives? If we are stuck at this 7x perceptual shift, what hope remains?
Are y’all familiar with the WEIRD problem in psychology? Basically, it is the finding that our overuse of American college students in psychological studies may produce results that apply to Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic people, but not universally to all humans… interesting, right? Well, as much as I value these findings, I think the acronym is either too short or just plain wrong. Partly based on the meta-theoretical work of Ken Wilber and substantiated by many emerging understandings of human development and growth (including the fact that the final stage of human brain development typically occurs after college age). One thing that shadows contemporary psychological theory, due in large part to its WEIRD bias, is the fact that we are normalizing the thought patterns of immature humans. We are calling ‘normal’ things that we are measuring as normal under the demonstrably false assumption that human beings are developmentally the same from age 18 to 122 (the oldest verified modern human). Of course, when we say it out loud instead of letting it hide as an assumption, we see how ludicrous it is.
Let’ pull another thread into this pattern — meditation studies show that negativity bias (the psychological name for this 7x phenomenon we’re talking about) is reduced by introduction to basic mindfulness practices. Though I haven’t found a study, my hypothesis is that an advanced meditator study would find even more startling differences in the negativity bias — just as we have found so many positive differences in the psychology and emotional well-being of advanced meditators. What if they (advanced meditators) aren’t freaks? What if they are our examples of what a fully developed and mature human looks like? What if our expectations of schadenfreude in humans is an accurate expectation adolescents and those who get emotionally stuck at that level of development, but not at all characteristic of a mature member of the species? What if the same is true of our expectations about relationships to truth vs. manipulation or power domination vs. egalitarianism or greed vs. beneficence?
IMHO we have a global culture that lionizes people stuck in adolescence — endlessly hungry for power, prestige, money, acknowledgement, etc. — and clueless about any deeper wisdom that true elderhood might bring. Our friend Ken Wilber (and Carl Jung for that matter) would say that these folks haven’t done their shadow work, causing key aspects of their being to get developmentally stuck — the economic and cultural rewards that we’ve been doling out for this immaturity, those don’t help. (For another perspective on this endless hunger theme, read the last section of “Lemons, Lemonade, and Chicken Coops”)
Our failure has been twofold: providing a path to wisdom and elderhood for our people AND developing socio-political systems that put those elders in the seats of power in our world. The reintroduction of wise elders into our ecology in the right locations of leadership and power IS the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone — it is a core move whose ripple effects will go SO FAR into creating the world we all yearn for that we will be floored by how many things can change and how fast they can change.
In the immortal words of Ted Lasso, “Believe!”
