Why we are miscoded for negativity

We are genetically miscoded for the context in which we live, and it limits our ability to thrive.

Here's a surprising truth: our brains are biased towards the negative. We're quicker to notice bad news, more likely to remember setbacks, and often react more strongly to challenges than wins.

While this helped our ancestors survive, it can hold us back in today’s world. By focusing too heavily on what's wrong, we risk overlooking what could go right, including opportunities that may be closer than we think.

An adapted excerpt from The Four Principles by Adrian Gore:

In 1979, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced prospect theory. Which found that losses loom larger than gains. They called this ‘loss aversion’ – and it provides the psychological and mathematical foundation for how negative information has a stronger grip on us than positive information.

To explore ‘why’ this behaviour evolved, we can turn to evolutionary psychology, which suggests that loss aversion may have evolved as an adaptive survival mechanism when life for our human ancestors on the savannah was short, harsh and brutal. Take the famous ‘Iceman’ Otzi, who appears to have been killed in a clash between hunting parties, or Lucy, an early human ancestor, whose remains suggest a fatal fall from a great height.

American social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues explain the cognitive tendency for negativity as follows: ‘Throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased the probability of passing along their genes.’ In addition, an important meta-study by Baumeister and colleagues, explored the extent of negative biases – and found conclusively that negative attitudes are about twice as prevalent as positive ones, and so to influence our attitudes, positive information needs to work doubly as hard.

This ‘negativity bias’, to which we’re inherently prone, means that without intervention, we’re likely to focus on threats or setbacks, potentially missing chances for advancement. Optimism works by countering this bias and tuning our attention towards positive possibilities. By counteracting our built-in sensitivity to losses, optimism helps us register the positive signals we would otherwise overlook.

Seeking out positive signals: identifying opportunities and executing them in a networked environment

The power of optimism is not only in enabling us to identify opportunities, but crucially, in facilitating their execution. This is a direct consequence of the deeply networked nature of the modern world.

In the world of our ancestors – a world of wild animals, physical threats, deadly infectious diseases, food scarcity, death in childbirth and average life expectancy below forty – the negative instinct was the correct one. It kept us risk-averse, vigilant and alive.

In today’s highly interdependent environments, however, we face entirely different threats that are largely systemic in nature – arising from failing healthcare and education systems, crumbling city infrastructures, attacks on governance, financial crises, as well as climate change, pandemics, global conflict, artificial intelligence and cyberattacks. These are complex systems. To influence or lead in these systems requires a different approach to how we evolved.

These challenges require leadership and collaboration generated by seeking out positive cues. Importantly, getting a system to work and fostering cooperation entails motivating strangers who are dispersed across time and space, not living in the same place and in the same clan. Negative feedback loops rarely drive change or progress.

Systemic challenges require an affirming framework – one that sets a vision, defines goals and creates positive feedback loops. This is the key strength and importance of optimism.

A positive attitude and pro-social behaviour tend to spread through social contacts, multiplying impact. Long-term studies have shown that happiness and optimism are contagious across connections.

For example, a 2008 study in The British Medical Journal over twenty years, found that if someone becomes happier, the chance of their close contacts (friends, spouses, neighbours) becoming happier significantly rises – by about 8 per cent for spouses, 25 per cent for friends, and 34 per cent for neighbours. In other words, one person’s optimism measurably improves others’ emotional state, which can create clusters of positivity in a community. When people feel positive and trusting, they share information and cooperate more readily. Information and ideas flow faster in a positive network, and opportunities that one person spots can quickly propagate to others.

Take modern-day organisations. Starting a business involves an intricate process of managing many stakeholders and networks – shareholders, regulators, employees, customers, and more. In terms of leading an organisation, influence and outcomes are shaped laterally and emergently, not just top down.

Seeking out negative signals erodes nodes in the network (people, teams, platforms) by creating noise and distrust, and undermining coordination. Seeking out positive signals, in contrast, strengthens nodes by building trust, cooperation, faster learning and innovation. It changes the attitude – which in turn changes the narrative. As leaders, how we frame the narrative is crucial – but I argue that attitude is even more important.

People tend to assume that attitude follows facts. In complex systems, however, attitude often precedes outcomes – and in doing so, shapes the facts themselves. Systems analysts tell us that in these systems, the most effective place to intervene is to shift the mindset or paradigm through which we engage with the system in the first place.

Donella Meadows, the influential American systems thinker, developed a hierarchy of leverage points – places to intervene in a system ranked by effectiveness. Near the top of her list? ‘The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.’

She wrote: ‘Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, come system goals and information flows, feedback, stocks, flows and everything else about systems . . . ‘

And how do you change paradigms? Meadows continued: ‘You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.’

It is those open-minded people, the active change agents, who hold the key. In essence, she was talking about people who have been disciplined and sophisticated enough to resist their default negativity bias and embrace the possibility of positive change.

Bringing all this together, it becomes clear that the First Principle, Disciplined Optimism, is fundamental to impact in life and leadership. Seeking out positive signals enables us to identify opportunities, and then seeding the networks required to execute on them with optimism.

By combining these effects, we demonstrate that optimism can serve as an impact multiplier. Personally, a deliberate positive mindset can make you about two times more likely to spot and pursue opportunities (offsetting the 2:1 negative bias).

Socially, this optimism multiplies information and positive behaviour and encourages a network of people to achieve better outcomes together, giving a combined effect of at least threefold across observed studies of diffusion and collaboration. Multiplying these factors, an optimistic approach could increase the results of your efforts by roughly 2 × 3 = 6 times compared to a pessimistic approach.

The clear and strong conclusion is that optimism enables us to identify opportunities that we wouldn’t ordinarily see without it, and to execute on those opportunities effectively within a network. I am not suggesting we ignore bad news or negative signals – only that we are already evolutionarily attuned to those signals and need to be sophisticated and strong-minded enough to seek out positive signals as well to reach a balanced position, and to identify opportunities where they are present. In a complex system, this seeking out the positive to create balance is crucial.

Principle one: Disciplined Optimism

Disciplined Optimism, not naïve optimism, requires the deliberate seeking of positive signals. This enables us to identify opportunities we would not otherwise see and to execute on them more effectively within complex networked systems such as companies, communities, and schools. It has a combined multiplier effect of six times when executing on opportunities.