We live in a negative society. We seem drawn towards negative stories in the news. When we get a performance review at work that’s filled with praise, we tend to focus on the one or two negative comments. When kids bring their report card home with four A’s, one B, and one D, the first thing parents ask is, “Why are you getting a D”?
Research scientists tell us that it’s in our nature to be this way. Here’s an excerpt from an academic paper published in 2001:
The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.
Rick Hanson, the author of Buddha’s Brain, has an idea why:
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, opening themselves to the good in their lives did not have the same evolutionary urgency as remembering and reacting to the bad. The biological inclination to feel threatened and react served them well. It kept them alive in extreme environments, and allowed them to pass their genes on to us, who are less well-served today by the inclination to register and react to whatever threatens us or causes discomfort. In fact, this hard-wired tendency is the cause of many emotional, physical and psychological problems, some large, many small.
So there you have it: we’re hardwired for negativity, and it’s not necessarily always good for us. In fact, researchers tell us that marriages need at least five positive interactions for each negative one, or else the couple risks divorce.
I would argue that this is one of the reasons that kids hate school. School is designed to be all about negative judgments. Sir Ken Robinson, in his awesome book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, writes that the prevailing question driving our schools is this: How intelligent are you? When kids walk into Spanish class, the teacher is going to say a bunch of things to them, write some stuff on the board, and eventually test them on it. That’s how the teacher can find out how intelligent the student is.
Kids know this is the game, and it’s stressful. How many positive experiences are pre-programmed into the school day? None, as far as I can tell.
Remember, you need five positive experiences to offset one negative event.
One idea, from Sir Ken, is to redesign school to ask a different question. Instead of “How intelligent are you?”, schools could ask, “How are you intelligent?” Responding to that question isn’t stressful, it’s uplifting! It’s positive! Can you imagine a school designed around helping kids build from their strengths, rather than trying to fix their weaknesses?
Here’s another idea, this one from Hanson: “Gratitude, the experience of what is good in one’s life, even abundantly good, is a powerful and direct antidote to thoughts and feelings of being threatened.”
What if kids started and ended each day with a gratitude ritual that elevated in their consciousness the good things that are happening in their lives?
In the past fifty years, research scientists have learned a lot about the human mind and human behavior. Fixing our schools is not that hard. We just have to read what research scientists are telling us, then put it into practice.
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