Baumeister and Tierney on the Negativity Bias, the Power of the Bad
What are Availability Entrepreneurs, what do apocalyptic predictions do, and how many Americans die in the bathtub? Roy Baumeister and John Tierney examine the Negativity Bias, the power of the bad, and they give us practical tips on how to deal with it in everyday life:
“Apocalyptic prophecies have become so commonplace that a nationwide sample of American schoolchildren under ten, when asked what they thought the earth would look like when they grew up, one in three children expressed the fear that there might not be an earth anymore. Sociologists call this kind of adult child scare availability entrepreneur, i.e. availability entrepreneurs. These are journalists, activists, academics, trial lawyers and politicians who capitalize on the human tendency to measure a danger by how many examples we can think of, in other words, are available. The number of people who have been killed by al-Qaeda, ISIS and their allies in the last twenty years is less than the number of Americans who have died in their bathtub.”
– Roy F. Baumeister / John Tierney in their book “The Power of the Bad – No longer seeing black and living well”, page 26.
