What Can Go Right

Draft for the author · not yet in her words

One of the major problems we have as humans is our habit of seeing that what can go wrong, will go wrong, while failing to see the corollary: what can go right, will go right.

The habit has a name. Psychologists call it negativity bias, and Roy Baumeister and colleagues summed up the evidence in 2001 under a blunt title: "Bad Is Stronger Than Good." Losses, threats and failures weigh more in us than equal amounts of gain. For our ancestors that was sound bookkeeping; missing one predator cost more than missing one meal. The bookkeeping outlived its use, and it now bends our sense of what is likely, so the good outcomes look smaller than they are.

The tilt

The corollary is not wishful thinking. A good outcome becomes probable when something keeps tilting the odds its way, the way a catalyst works again and again without being used up. In the language of the last chapter, it takes a constructor. Without the tilt, a good outcome is only luck. With it, the good outcome becomes the likely one. A teacher who keeps asking the right question is that kind of constructor. So is a habit, a family, a small working group, or a person using engineered intelligence well.

It is all maybe a mind game. Think as a mind, not as humans do. The human reflex scans for danger. A mind can set the reflex aside long enough to weigh what could go right with the same care it gives to what could go wrong, and then go looking for the arrangements that make the good outcome likely.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C. and Vohs, K. D. "Bad Is Stronger Than Good." Review of General Psychology 5 (2001): 323-370.