Reasons to Be Cheerful (Ep. 417) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"As Baumeister noted, he thought he’d find areas of life where the negativity bias doesn’t hold sway, but he didn’t. Even in areas where you’d almost be certain that positivity would rule.
BAUMEISTER: So a very different kind of evidence looked at friendship formation. There was a classic study that took over an entire dormitory and tried to see who would become friends with whom. And they had all sorts of elaborate theories about political and religious similarity and so on. Well, what seemed to work the best— the strongest effect was who lived near each other. So people made friends with the ones who were nearby them. So this went into all the textbooks as: “Just being exposed to someone, being in regular contact produces friendship.” But then 20 years later, somebody did a follow-up and also measured who became enemies. And it turns out living near somebody increases the likelihood you’ll become enemies even stronger than the likelihood you’ll become friends...
Good parents— that it basically becomes a genetic issue, that the kid’s genes determine their I.Q. Whereas bad parenting reduces the link from genes. So the implication is, you can make your kids stupider by being a bad parent, particularly if you’re abusive or something like that. You can’t make your kid any smarter. All you can do is let the genes shine through...
TIERNEY: In general, it takes about four good things to overcome one bad thing. Now, that’s a rule of thumb. It doesn’t apply to every kind of thing, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind in evaluating the impact of your actions, in evaluating how you’re doing in your life. You know that if you’re late for one meeting, you don’t make up for it by showing up early the next time...
BAUMEISTER: Professors complain a whole lot. I remember visiting a university and I was having a conversation like this. I say, “This is a wonderful job,” and so on. And they looked at each other and said, “Well, we never say that out loud. You have to always be complaining. Otherwise, the administration won’t give us a raise. We always have to act like everything’s awful.” And you mentioned income and health. The effects on happiness — the curves are very interesting on those. If you’re really sick, it does lower your happiness. But the difference between being moderately healthy and really healthy is almost a negligible effect on how happy you are with life as a whole. The same with income. I think the general consensus is really having serious money problems where you just don’t have enough money — yeah, that’s a downer. It’s hard to be happy with that. But to go from, say, well-to-do to really-well-to-do is a much smaller difference. You just don’t notice the positive things. You notice the negative...
For decades now, there’s been discussion about whether the news media is too negative, too problem-based instead of solution-based. One analysis of global broadcasts from 1979 to 2010 showed a steady trend toward more negative tones. What’s also different now is how technology has made more news more available, all the time. Virtually inescapable. Even if you don’t opt in to every news alert about the latest shooting or political outrage, somebody close to you probably does, and they’ll let you know about it. For media outlets, this emphasis on alarming news is a business decision.
BAUMEISTER: So they’re dealing with what their customers want. And customers don’t want to shell out a lot for a newspaper that says, “Oh, things are pretty good. Everything’s fine.” They will much more buy an extra edition that says, “A new crisis, and the president has done something, or there is a threat of war, or a danger, the climate is going to melt down.” There was just something in the newspaper yesterday that was reprinted from 2004, a prediction that by 2020, several major European cities will be underwater. There’ll be global shortages leading to warfare breaking out all over the world. So, no sign of that yet, but it’s early in the year.
Recent surveys from the Pew Research Center found that around two-thirds of U.S. adults feel worn out by the news, and nearly half of social media users say that they’re worn out by political posts and discussions. So how are you supposed to counteract a high-bad environment? Tierney and Baumeister recommend what they call a low-bad diet.
TIERNEY: I try to follow people on Facebook and Twitter who do positive stuff. I don’t really watch the news that much. When there is a terrorist attack or a school shooting, I don’t even turn on the news. I’ll read one paragraph about what happened. That’s all I want to know about it. And I try not to watch the back-and-forth, left-and-right punditry just sliming each other. So I really try to read positive stuff, uplifting stories about science or history. And one of the best tips I picked up was this idea of capitalization, that you should share a joy, that when something good happens, tell someone about it. When someone tells you about something good, respond enthusiastically or at least fake it. But it is amazing how much that helps...
GRANDJEAN: A Reuters survey, run in 2019, and there we found out that 32 percent of the people worldwide said they often or sometimes actively avoid the news... Fifty-eight percent do so because it has a negative effect on their mood. And 40 percent say it’s because they feel powerless to change.
One reason these numbers have been climbing, Grandjean suspects, is the means by which the news is increasingly delivered these days, for instance, in staccato alerts via social media. This strips away most of the context; all you get is the alarming headline or summary, often amplified by people in your network who are already angry or frightened."
