Why negativity wins
We want humanity to become kinder, friendlier, more trusting; meanwhile, we lament the seemingly endless deluge of negativity and conflict that makes up our existence. But nothing fundamental about human nature really seems to change. Why is it so hard for people to achieve that dream of becoming a better species? Here are a few musings on why that might be.
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To start with, pain and fear are actually selected for from an evolutionary perspective. Here’s an example that is often cited:
As you walk through the woods, you see a snake-like stick. Your body, without any volition, immediately activates its flight response. You jump backward, adrenaline and other stress hormones rushing through your body. A second later, your conscious mind realizes that it’s just a stick, not a snake, and you feel silly.
But from an evolutionary (i.e., survival) perspective, this hair-trigger fear response makes perfect sense. Consider the outcomes: if your flight response activates but the “snake” turns out to be a stick, you are shaken and it will take a few minutes for your body to calm down, but there is no lasting damage; on the other hand, if your flight response had not reacted, and it had actually been a snake which then bit you, you might end up dead. The cost of overreacting and being wrong is minimal, but the cost of underreacting and being wrong could be fatal. Therefore, it is better to be fearful and assume the worst about the world in order to protect yourself.
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Next up is the prisoner’s dilemma, of which you may have heard, but here’s a refresher:
Two men are arrested and accused of collaborating on a serious crime. While the police don’t have enough evidence to convict the men of that serious crime, they do have enough to convict them both of a lesser crime. But the cops want to nail at least one of the guys for the major offense, so they separate the two men and bring both of them the same deal: rat out your partner and we’ll let you go and only nail the other guy. What should the men do? If they both keep their mouths shut, they will each be convicted of the lesser crime and spend one year in jail. If they both rat each other out, the cops will use their confessions to ensure they both get three years in jail. But if one rats out his partner, while that partner remains silent, then the rat gets to go free while his partner gets the max of five years in jail.
From a purely logical perspective, the only rational thing to do is to be a rat (i.e., to “defect”) regardless of what you think your partner might do. Mathematically, if you defect, you will spend either zero or three years in jail, depending on your partner’s choice—that averages to 1.5 years in jail. But if you keep quiet, you will spend either one or five years in jail—an average of 3 years. Clearly, betraying the other person is the smart option!
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Even after several millennia of civilization, humans are still very susceptible to negative emotions because nature has programmed it into us. Being negative keeps us safe from lots of really bad outcomes, even if it does cost us some happiness and contentment in our day-to-day lives.
And ironically, while we credit civilization with teaching us to be less barbaric, xenophobic, etc., its success may actually be helping the negativity. One way in which the prisoner’s dilemma breaks down is through iteration, or repeated interactions over time. If the two aforementioned criminals had worked together on jobs before, and knew that they would likely do so again in the future, then the “defect” option becomes much less practical; they have better reason to trust each other and know that defection will likely be punished in the future. So when people interact with each other on a regular basis, choosing the mutually-beneficial option makes much more sense. This is why traditional tribes and modern-day small towns often have such high levels of trust—you are going to see and deal with the same people over and over again, so you’d better watch your reputation! But what happens when—thanks to civilization’s tendency to concentrate human populations—we end up in massive cities, where we hardly know anyone and are unlikely to have repeated interactions with most of the people we meet? The tendency to “defect” (i.e., be a jerk) is far less costly.
A similar situation unfolds online. Why is Facebook and other social media so riddled with negativity? Even if we are kind of cranky in real life, the person we become online is often far more venomous. Part of it is indeed the relative anonymity that exists on social media; even if we have a public profile, we still interact with people at a remove, from behind a keyboard and monitor instead of face-to-face. We are outside of each other’s direct presence, and we lack the body language and vocal cues that tell us so much about a person—this makes it easy to view the other as a kind of abstract stranger. Due to this emotional and physical distance, we feel less empathy for them, and we can yell at or demean them with few consequences—they probably won’t come to our house to assault us, nor can they get us fired from our jobs unless we said something astonishingly heinous.
But Jaron Lanier offers an additional explanation, noting that what the social networks most want us to do is spend more time on them, to “engage” as much as possible. Emotions are a surefire way to get people engaged, and unfortunately, the negative emotions provide the best “bargain” for the social media platforms. As Lanier explains, “Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.” So the negative aspects of human nature, always easier to summon than the positive ones, are actually being further exacerbated by the current model of social media. People are right when they say it is making us meaner and less trusting.
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So yes, it seems there’s plenty of bad news. But are there counterbalancing aspects of human nature that can help us pivot more towards positivity? How can we encourage humans to act with greater empathy, trust, and communal good will? There are a few ideas that might help point the way, and I’ll address them soon in a follow-up post.
