More on Cognitive Bias - Ten Troublesome Human Instincts or Cognitive Misconceptions cont. 3

3. Negativity instinct (you notice the 'bad' rather than the 'good' news, etc; it is the default position of the brain that gives preference to negatives, ie what can go wrong; generally the good things are around small improvements that may take time to be noticed while the bad things tend to be more unexpected, immediate and have a large impact, like natural disasters, eg pandemics,  tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, cyclones/hurricanes/storms, famines, droughts, refugees, disease, fires, floods, shark attacks, starvation, etc and man-made disasters, eg the global financial crisis (starting in 2007), revolutions, coups, terror attacks, massacres, genocide, demonstrations (especially violent ones), kidnappings, plane crashes, oil spills, nuclear reactor disasters, chemical spill, indiscriminate use of chemicals, etc; generally most people have a worldview that is more negative than reality; there are 3 parts to this instinct

    i) dis-remembering the past (romanticising the past; having selective memory loss, ie usually only remember the good things of the past and forget the bad, ie the miseries and brutalities of the past are minimised or forgot)

    ii) selective reporting (good news is less reportable than bad news; gradual improvement is not newsworthy; with improved technology, news, especially bad news, travels fast; pressure groups selectively choose data to support their own point of view, especially around surveillance of suffering; focused on alarmist exaggerations and prophecies; illusion of constant deterioration, ie we are
"...constantly alerted to bad events in the present. The doom-laden feeling that this creates in us is intensified by our inability to remember the past......creates great stress for some people and makes other people lose hope..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018

NB

"...negative stories are more dramatic than neutral or positive ones. Remember how simple it is to construct a story of crisis......temporary dip pulled out of its context of a long-term improvement. Remember that we live in a connected and transparent world where reporting about suffering is better than it has ever been before..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018

    iii) feeling, not thinking (if feelings dominate thinking, you become a current pessimist, ie we have many problems to solve, and a past optimist, ie reminiscing about past glories; need to become a possibilist, ie
"...someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the over-dramatic worldview......see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible......it is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018

Need to be careful that you don't become a person who believes that nothing is improving and lose confidence in the measures that are actually working.

NB
"...the loss of hope is probably the most devastating consequence of the negativity instinct and the ignorance it causes..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018

To control the negativity instinct:

- think 'better and bad' simultaneously (by keeping 2 thoughts in your head at the same time, ie we still have many challenges but things are improving)

- bad news gets preferential treatment in reporting over good news like gradual improvement (calm yourself by thinking about an equally large positive improvement)

NB With gradual improvement having periodic dips, you are more likely to hear about the dips than overall improvement. Also,
"...more news does not equal more suffering. More bad news is sometimes due to better surveillance of suffering, not a worsening world..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018

- don't censor history, ie remember the good and the bad of the past; not everything was good in the past; don't glorify the past.
NB
"...recognising when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better, we often don't hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful..."
Hans Rosling et al, 2018)