More On Reality's Negative Bias

REALITY FUNCTIONS AS IF it has a negative bias in a couple of ways. One we've already covered. Here's another one: Sometimes, no matter what decision is made, the chances are good it'll turn out badly. But since reality is not an experiment, you don't get to see what would have happened if another decision had been made. We don't get to look at a control group. For example, the U.S. used a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many people believe that was a bad idea. So many lives were lost. So much destruction. It wasn't necessary to end the war.

Another alternative was to use conventional warfare until Japan surrendered, which, given the way they fought on the other islands, and given the fact that they did not believe in surrender, may have cost many more lives on both sides. But we don't get to see how it would have turned out had another decision been made. As horrible as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, that decision may have been the least horrible of the alternatives. And if a different decision had been made, no doubt that decision would have been criticized too. Reality was biased — the cards were stacked against the decision-makers — no matter what was decided, it would have terrible consequences.

Sometimes life demands you make a decision between a bad choice and an even worse choice. The result is sometimes a cynical attitude for all the terrible things people have decided to do without really considering that we don't know if the alternatives would have been worse.

Another way reality can appear to have a negative bias is in dealing with others. Psychologists use a game called The Prisoner's Dilemma to test various ideas. The game mimics real life in a way: We need to choose to either cooperate with someone for our mutual benefit or do something that benefits only ourselves, and maybe even takes away from someone else.

For example, Joe steals a stapler from the company he works for. It benefits him and takes something away from the company. But Joe is also taking the risk of getting caught and having a lot taken away from him. The Prisoner's Dilemma has that feature also.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, a game is set up with two people who imagine they have committed a crime together. They are brought in for questioning in separate rooms. Each are offered the same deal. Let's say you are one of them. Here's the deal: If you confess and your partner does not confess, you go free and your partner gets ten years. If neither of you confess, you each get only one year. If you both confess, you each get five years. Imagine yourself with that dilemma. What would you choose?

This is often considered a way to test cooperative versus competitive attitudes. Usually the people in a given experiment play it again and again with the same partner, because this mimics real life even more closely. Most of the people you interact with are people you will interact with again and again. And how you interact in the future — how competitive or cooperative you treat any given person — usually does (and should) take into account how they have interacted with you in the past.

One of the findings of these experiments is pretty obvious: If you are a naturally cooperative person, which I'll bet you are, and you are pitted against a competitive person, you will lose. If I put a piece of candy on a table between you and a competitive person, who is likely to get the candy? The competitive person, not trying to be fair, will quickly grab the candy. You will get nothing.

Hopefully you would learn in multiple interactions to be more competitive with that person. But let's look at what has happened. A more beneficial strategy (cooperation) has been replaced with a less beneficial strategy (cut-throat competition). This phenomenon can lead to a cynical or pessimistic view of life.

When you have interactions with the same people over and over, you're likely to see more cooperative behavior. But when interactions are between people who will never see each other again, you're likely to see more cut-throat behavior. This is simple to explain. If you are a natural cooperator, and you let people in front of you on the freeway and yield and be polite and kind, you'll sometimes run into competitive behavior, so you'll get the short end of the stick again and again. Eventually, because you remember negative events better than positive events, your point of view will change and you may develop the belief that the "world is full of selfish people" and since you need to get to work on time too, you'll exhibit more competitive behavior, and as time goes on in an impersonal environment, cooperative people will turn into more competitive people out of what feels like self-preservation.

And so you're likely to find people in small towns being "nicer" (more cooperative) to strangers and people in big cities colder and meaner (more competitive) toward strangers. When people are packed together and forced into impersonal interactions, reality is biased toward the negative, toward selfishness, toward meanness, as cooperative people feel forced into a lower state by the circumstances.

Another aspect of this is that if a person has been convinced to deal with people competitively, their own experiences will tend to validate their belief. If a person is selfish and inconsiderate with others, she is much more likely to experience a world that seems to be full of selfish and inconsiderate people, making it seem obvious that with all these selfish and inconsiderate (competitive) people around, she'd better act selfish just to survive. Her original proposition that the world is a tough place that requires a cold-hearted attitude will make itself true. It functions as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

And one final way reality functions as if it had a negative bias is that the brain seeks evidence to confirm rather than to disconfirm. So as soon as one of these pessimistic, cynical, or defeatist beliefs start to form, your mind starts looking for evidence that you're right, and the belief starts to coalesce and harden into a firm belief — a firm, mistaken, unnecessarily negative view of the world — a view that makes you less effective at dealing with the world (especially other people), makes you feel bad more often, and a view that actually harms your health. Reality's quicksand has caught another victim.

More about this: A Negative Bias In Our Perception

Still more: Promotional Distortions

Further reading: How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. One of my favorite books.