Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and social psychology review, 5(4), 296-320.
It would be an interesting exercise to first read the similar Baumeister article and then read this. Baumeister’s article (published the same year and using much of the same research) has been quoted over twice as much (as of August 2021). Baumeister’s article is much more one-sided than this one, while Rozin’s article tends to dive more deeply into seeming counterfactuals and admits that negativity bias is not universal. The question, “Is one better science?” would hopefully yield a fruitful discussion in a seminar.
Summary
Rozin’s previous work in contagion (he did the cockroach in the juice experiment - see Rozin 1986 - and the Hitler’s sweater experiment - see Nemeroff 1994) showed that contagion seemed to mainly be a negative process. This negativity bias is present in other domains as well (this paper goes through many, including sensation and perception, attention and salience, and learning). Four types of negativity bias include negative potency, greater steepness of negative gradients, negativity dominance, and negative differentiation. Negative potency is shown in prospect theory, wherein negative stimuli are subjectively weighted more heavily than are positive stimuli of an equal magnitude (e.g., losing $100 is more negative than winning $100 is positive). Greater steepness of negative gradients refers to the fact that “negative events grow more rapidly in negativity as they are approached in space or time than do positive events.” This can be seen in the example of comparing the night before a final with the night before a vacation. Negative dominance is the most most robust type of negativity bias and is also shown in prospect theory, which shows that even unequal stimuli (e.g., equal chances of losing $100 and winning $150) can result in a gestalt negative evaluation. Finally, negative differentiation states that negative stimuli are generally viewed as more complex than are positive stimuli.
Rozin pays more attention to positivity bias, especially in regards to language. While there are more negative emotional words in the English language, positive words are used more frequently and show dominance in a variety of ways (e.g., the spectrum of happiness-sad is referred to as happiness). Finally, three different theories account for negativity bias: adaptive accounts, developmental accounts, and mechanistic theories (see p. 314 for elaboration on these theories).
Application
The most interesting application from this reading is one that is of special importance to the science community. Catchier, shorter titles get more citations (see Deng 2015 - though admittedly this research applies only to title length, not catchiness), as do papers that seem to show results in a single direction. Unfortunately, I don’t think that those reasons (especially the latter) result in better science.
Comments powered by Disqus.