The Unethical Life? #24: The Spies Who Came In From the Desert

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004135757.htm

Negativity Is Contagious, Study Finds

Date:

October 7, 2007

Source:

University of Chicago Press Journals

Summary:

Though we may not care to admit it, what other people think about something can affect what we think about it. This is how critics become influential and why our parents' opinions about our life choices continue to matter, long after we've moved out. But what kind of opinions have the most effect? A new study reveals that negative opinions cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse.

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Though we may not care to admit it, what other people think about something can affect what we think about it. This is how critics become influential and why our parents' opinions about our life choices continue to matter, long after we've moved out. But what kind of opinions have the most effect" An important new study in the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that negative opinions cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse.

"Consumer attitudes toward products and services are frequently influenced by others around them. Social networks, such as those found on Myspace and Facebook suggest that these influences will continue to be significant drivers of individual consumer attitudes as society becomes more inter-connected," explain Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang, and Shanker Krishnan (all of Indiana University). "Our research seeks to understand the conditions where group influence is strongest."

Consumers were presented with information about a new product and allowed to independently form their evaluations. As would be normally expected with many products, some of these evaluations were positive and others negative.

The researchers then revealed to participants whether their peers evaluated the product negatively or positively. They found that the opinions of others exert especially strong influence on individual attitudes when these opinions are negative. Additionally, consumers that privately held positive attitudes toward the product were more susceptible to influence from group opinion than those who initially held negative opinions.

Furthermore, the researchers also found that those with negative opinions of the product were likely to become even more negative if asked to participate in a group discussion: "When consumers expect to interact with other consumers through these forums, learning the views of these other consumers may reinforce and even polarize their opinions, making them more negative," the researchers reveal.

"This research has several interesting implications. First, given the strong influence of negative information, marketers may need to expend extra resources to counter-act the effects of negative word of mouth in online chatrooms, blogs and in offline media. Conversely, companies could damage the reputations of competitors by disseminating negative information online," the researchers explain. "Consumers should be aware that these social influence biases exist and are capable of significantly impacting their perceptions."

Reference: Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang, and Shanker Krishnan, "Anticipated Group Interaction: Coping with Valence Asymmetries in Attitude Shift." Journal of Consumer Research: October 2007.

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Materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The Negativity Bias (Wikipedia)

Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman proposed four elements of the negativity bias in order to explain its manifestation: negative potency, steeper negative gradients, negativity dominance, and negative differentiation.^[4]

Negative potency refers to the notion that, while possibly of equal magnitude or emotionality, negative and positive items/events/etc. are not equally salient. Rozin and Royzman note that this characteristic of the negativity bias is only empirically demonstrable in situations with inherent measurability, such as comparing how positively or negatively a change in temperature is interpreted.

With respect to positive and negative gradients, it appears to be the case that negative events are thought to be perceived as increasingly more negative than positive events are increasingly positive the closer one gets (spatially or temporally) to the affective event itself. In other words, there is a steeper negative gradient than positive gradient. For example, the negative experience of an impending dental surgery is perceived as increasingly more negative the closer one gets to the date of surgery than the positive experience of an impending party is perceived as increasingly more positive the closer one gets to the date of celebration (assuming for the sake of this example that these events are equally positive and negative). Rozin and Royzman argue that this characteristic is distinct from that of negative potency because there appears to be evidence of steeper negative slopes relative to positive slopes even when potency itself is low.

Negativity dominance describes the tendency for the combination of positive and negative items/events/etc. to skew towards an overall more negative interpretation than would be suggested by the summation of the individual positive and negative components. Phrasing in more Gestalt-friendly terms, the whole is more negative than the sum of its parts.

Negative differentiation is consistent with evidence suggesting that the conceptualization of negativity is more elaborate and complex than that of positivity. For instance, research indicates that negative vocabulary is more richly descriptive of the affective experience than that of positive vocabulary.^[5]Furthermore, there appear to be more terms employed to indicate negative emotions than positive emotions.^[6][7] The notion of negative differentiation is consistent with the mobilization-minimization hypothesis,^[8] which posits that negative events, as a consequence of this complexity, require a greater mobilization of cognitive resources to deal with the affective experience and a greater effort to minimize the consequences.

Negativity Bias (Wikipedia)

Studies of the negativity bias have also been related to research within the domain of decision-making, specifically as it relates to risk aversion or loss aversion. When presented with a situation in which a person stands to either gain something or lose something depending on the outcome, potential costs are more heavily considered than potential gains.^[1][35][42] The greater consideration of losses (i.e. negative outcomes) is in line with the principle of negative potency as proposed by Rozin and Royzman.^[4] This issue of negativity and loss aversion as it relates to decision-making is most notable addressed by Drs. Daniel Kahneman's and Amos Tversky's prospect theory.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. (Henry V)