I first heard about this in school, but also on social media there’s been this idea and they’ve say studies suggest that we are negatively biased. Similar to how the say we’re supposedly drawn to negative things better than positive.
I don’t think it’s true. I remember the positive experiences very well. Last night I was pondering what has kept me personally away from moving into a Rightist ideology.
I think large contribution to that is all the people who decided to help me when I needed it the most. I remember them. I want to encourage others to please uplift others when you’re able. They might not return you the favor, but please believe me it can end up steering people in the correct path.
A ruthless world of nothing but spikes just makes people give up hope.
I certainly don’t remember anything else. I have to struggle to remember anything good that ever happens to me.
But the bad stuff? Right at the front, all day every day.
I’m glad you brought it up. I am suspicious of it in large part because it serves the narrative (that I believed existed prior) that people are more miserable because they spend time on social media consuming bad news and that if they just consumed more good news, they’d be fine. But this belief largely benefits traditional media and its hegemonic hold in the capitalist west. It is social media that, up to a point (it has its problems that got worse over time of being another tool of imperialism), allowed people to see through the structure of traditional media and learn things beyond it, including political views that were erased normally. I mean, it was literally said out loud IIRC, that tiktok was a problem because people were basically learning about the genocide of Palestinians through it.
Another aspect to this with the internet is that algorithms drive a lot of it on the big platforms, which means it’s the algorithms that are largely in control, not us. So say you could look at a platform like that and prove that it’s overall negatively biased in what the algorithm pushes. Does that mean we’re negatively biased? No, it means the algorithm is creating a feedback loop where it leads people further and further into a negative spiral.
This is to be expected if the most attention-grabbing stuff happening is bad news. When I come on here and I see some title about China doing another cool thing, I find that compelling. But there’s little like that in the capitalist west to grab onto. The majority of what’s happening for regular people is bad news. So what are they supposed to do, “try to focus on the positive”? This might help in the short-term, but it doesn’t resolve the causes of the negative and until those causes are addressed, the negative will keep recurring.
This is a somewhat meandering way of saying, I think it’s a narrative born out of capitalism and works for its interests. There may be some context-specific truth to it, such as from the standpoint of people who are chronically traumatized, stressed, and their needs not met, but that doesn’t make it universal principle.
I think the most important thing for us is to stay real. Fake positivity is extremely dangerous.
If you promise someone they will be fine, but they end up not be, you don’t just hurt that person, you hurt their family, friends, individual grief ripples through entire communities.
It creates trauma. I’ve met hundreds of people who refuse to trust anyone because of trauma like this. Just these 100 cases end up rippling through the minds of thousands and those thousands into millions and so on. But because they source has become so alienated and nobody knows how to deal with the cause of the ripples, we’re stuck where we are right now.
I’m not sure if people quite understand that when Rosa said Socialism or Barbarism it wasn’t a question between the two. It was either stay in Barbarism or try to solve it. At least that’s my interoperation. It’s extremely important for us to try to find the source of our problems and address them.
Which requires pragmatic realism. But a Dialectical-Materialist would approach pragmatism with a rather simple rule: Everything in moderation, including moderation. Ironically the rules are extremely simple one could say, but sticking to them is nearly impossible, in our world, because it was build on different set of rules.
More on a tangent here, but I’ve discussed psychology with very long time serving doctors in the field, one of them used dialectical behavior therapy to treat patients with personality disorders. He told me that there’s people that are classified as “BPD” and on the flipside there’s people who are classified under “NPD” and when he explained the criteria, it almost sounded like he is describing ultra-leftist and a fascist. Now I have to stress the point here that political ideology is not mental health issue. There are certainly people with disorders in any political group, they are not there because of their mental health issues. This is for anyone reading. Since it’s a public forum I speak in I try to assume I’m being publicly observed by potential newbies. This is not to claim the reader is necessarily ignorant.
But what’s interesting to me is that he said BPD patients have a 90% success rate of recovery within 3-4 years of treatment. While NPD has a 10% recovery rate. And that make me wonder if the reason why someone with NPD fails to recover, because of personal failings or is it because our world encourages their self-destructive maladaptive behavior?
It made me think about how we can fairly easily convert an Ultra to a Marxist, but to change a Fascist into a socialist would require to re-organize the entire system. which again leads us to pragmatic road. Not left or right, but bouncing between the values of the two and taking only the appropriate ones.
I could also be wrong. I always highly welcome critique, but sometimes I might be in a state of despair and then act rash against my own words. It’s annoying. Apologies everyone. All the 5 people reading this lol
It’s not true. We remember experiences that elicit strong emotions better. This is a separate matter entirely from the fact that we engage more with negative content. Engaging with and remembering something are different things.
Evolutionary it makes sense that we remember any experience that had a strong impact on us, whether it’s good or bad. The brain filters out and generalizes our day to day routines, but things that are exceptional are memorable.
I think it’s broadly true because of evolutionary pressures, eg you remember burning your hand in the fire because it burned you when you tried it last time.
