PERSONAL SPECIAL .................... People have a positivity bias, shows study

People have a positivity bias, shows study





Journalists pride themselves on a willingness to bring you bad news. The more death and destruction, the more words and pictures.

If it bleeds, it leads. But it turns out that at heart we are Pollyannas. We can’t help accentuating the positive, according to researchers who have analyzed nearly two million articles as well as millions of books and billions of tweets.

A team led by applied mathematicians at the University of Vermont and the Mitre Corporation used a computerized algorithm called the hedonometer to gauge the emotional content of words. They found that no matter what the medium or language, people tended to use more positive words than negative. Despite all the grim news and the social media snark, journalists and the world’s chatterers are more likely to use upbeat words like “healthy” and “friend” than downers like “suffering” or “idiot.” The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a sweeping confirmation of the Pollyanna hypothesis.

They took the name from the novel about a girl who plays the “glad game”, always trying to see the best in everything.

The notion of a universal positivity bias in the way we communicate intrigues linguists and psychologists because it’s a counterpoint to our more obvious tendency to accentuate the negative.

There’s an evolutionary explanation for our general negativity bias: Early humans oblivious to potential threats didn’t live long enough to pass on genes.

It’s not surprising that bad events still have a stronger impact on us than good ones, and that we recognize hostile faces more quickly than friendly ones. We are also more careful in identifying bad states of mind. In English and other languages, there are more words for negative emotions than for positive ones. When we’re in a good mood, we tend to say simply that we’re happy, but we carefully distinguish sadness from anger, fear, frustration and other unpleasant feelings.

So if we pay so much attention to negative events and feelings, why do we keep sounding like Pollyannas? There are various theories.

One is that a lot more good things happen to us than bad things, so we end up saying more positive things.

Researchers found that people tend to recall events as more positive than they were really were, apparently to diminish the lingering impact of painful experiences.“While there are terrible stories in the news and awful threads on Twitter, we tend not go on about them,“ said Peter Sheridan Dodds, who led the hedonometer project with Chris Danforth, a Vermont colleague, and Brian Tivnan of Mitre. “We use language to help us get through hard times.“

Previous studies with social media have shown that while people are quick to read bad news, they prefer to share uplifting news with their friends. That points to what may be the chief explanation for our use of positive language: We care what others think about us.

John Tierney

THE NYT NEWS SERVICE