Negativity bias

What it is

Giving more weight to bad news, criticism and negative events than to equally strong positive ones.

Related

• Availability heuristic bias
  Bad news is both salient and more weighty, so it dominates what we recall.
• Loss aversion bias
  Both are the same asymmetry in two settings: bad outweighs good, losses outweigh gains.
• Appeal to fear fallacy
  We weigh threats more than rewards, which is why fear appeals grab attention.
• News illusion bias
  News chooses bad news because it grabs us.

References

• Wikipedia: Negativity bias en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “What we notice: filtering too much information”