

Bad is Stronger Than Good
The Power of the Dark Side

For example, the report looked at studies about the effects of everyday events. Discussing the conclusion of a 1996 study (Sheldon, Ryabn, and Reis), they say:
Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. Specifically, after a bad day, participants were likely to have lower well-being on the next day.
The report looked at the studies of married couples conducted over decades by Dr. John Gottman and colleagues, who videotaped the married couples in the laboratory and at home. They found that "negative interactions predicted marital satisfaction more strongly than positive interactions".
Gottman concluded that positive interactions must outnumber negative interactions by at least five to one, or "the relationship is likely to fail and breakup".
Baumeister and colleagues looked at studies concerning emotions, memory, information processing, feedback, forming impressions, and stereotypes, and came to the same conclusion that the bad and negative is relatively more powerful than good and positive.
Regarding forming impressions and stereotypes: "...bad reputations are easy to acquire but difficult to lose, whereas good reputations are difficult to acquire but easy to lose. ". From life experience, we all know this to be true.
The report authors looked outside the laboratory, as well:
Among journalists and communication scientists, it is considered common knowledge that bad events are more newsworthy and attract more reader attention. ....bad information does receive more thorough information processing than good information. Bad information is more likely to seize attention, and it receives more conscious processing as well.
"Even with people with profound brain damage, bad still outweighs good," the authors conclude, from studies concerning neurological processes. In one study where brain-damaged patients received different kinds of feedback (Gauggel, Wietasch, Bayer & Rolko, 2000), they reacted more quickly to negative feedback.
Why is bad stronger than good? Baumeister and colleagues posit that bad is more critical to survival, and part of the evolutionary process:
From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that 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 probability of passing along their genes....Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard to good ones. Hence, it would be adaptive to be psychologically designed to respond to bad more strongly than good.
The Dark Side in the Workplace
The power of the dark side is found in the workplace, according to a book by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer. Based on studying 238 professionals working on 26 creative projects in seven different companies, and analyzing nearly 12,000 daily diaries, The Progress Principle argues for the importance of the inner work lives of employees in advancing organizational goals: The better their inner work lives, the more creative and productive they are.Amabile and Kramer find that the single most important factor in building a positive inner work life in making progress on meaningful work. This progress can be incremental and comprised of small wins. They call this the progress principle. Interestingly, it has a dark side.
The dark side is that setbacks are more powerful than wins in the development of the inner work life.
The power of setbacks is, in fact, twice as strong as the power of progress in the promotion of happiness and three times as strong in inducing frustration. Thus, small losses can overwhelm small wins. (Learn more from this article on SmartBrief.)
In the workplace, managers can use this information and prioritize the elimination of obstacles that could cause setbacks.
Businesses receiving negative reviews can use knowledge of the power of the dark side to make sure bad information is countered and neutralized with compelling, informative responses.