Reality Has a Negative Bias?

REALITY DOESN'T REALLY HAVE ANY bias at all, of course. But there are some ways reality works against an optimistic point of view. Not always, and not in all things, but it really sticks out when it does. Why? Because it's usually easier to notice when something goes wrong than when they go right. That's why Murphy's Law has become so popular: It expresses what seems to be true.

Murphy's original law says, "If anything can go wrong, it will." That isn't true, of course, but when you have a project and you're trying to make it go right, and every aspect of it goes right — all the various parts are working well — except one thing, what do you notice? What is your attention on? What causes you to feel intense emotions? What will you remember most? The one thing that went wrong. Most of your attention is on the thing that made your project fail.

One of my favorite Murphy's Laws is, "The chance of the buttered side of the bread falling face down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet." If it lands face up, you may feel a little relief but you'll probably forget about it soon after it happens. If the buttered bread lands face down, on the other hand, especially on expensive carpet, you may get upset, you'll have to clean it up, etc. It is more emotionally-laden, involves more work and inconvenience and frustration, and is therefore more memorable.

A good description of this phenomenon is in the book, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. The author, Thomas Gilovich, says that the entrance to the Psychology Department at Cornell University where he works has six doors. Every once in awhile, the janitor neglects to unlock one of them. Gilovich enters the building from different directions on different days, and every once in awhile, he tries to go through a locked door. Even though he wrote a book on how to avoid being fooled by perceptions like these, it feels to him as if he always gets the locked door. Why? Because every time he goes through an unlocked door, it doesn't register in his mind as an event. Nothing really happened. He went to work. No emotion. Nothing memorable.

But when he expects the door to open and pushes on it and is stopped — that little moment of surprise and frustration is more memorable, and reminds him of every other similar experience when he tried to push open one of those doors and it stopped him. Lots of memories of a similar experience come to mind at that moment, and no memories at all of going through an unlocked door come to mind because there wasn't much to remember about those times (even though there were far more of them). His natural conclusion, based on his personal experience, is that he always gets the locked door. Notice, also, that he never would find out if one of the doors was locked on the other days. He doesn't try all six doors each day. If the door opens, he goes through and goes on about his business. Reality, in this sense, is biased. Every time he goes through an unlocked door, reality does not alert him to the fact that one of the other doors was locked and he avoided it. But reality alerts him every time he tries to go through a locked door.

Making the conclusion, "I always get the locked door," is trivial — it won't make much of a difference. But what if you make the same kind of conclusion about your boss or one of your children? Your conclusion seems to be a fact you have lots of evidence for. Your boss is always angry. Your son never cleans his room. This phenomenon can lead to the formation of pessimistic, cynical, or defeatist beliefs and ways of looking at the world. Read more about this here.