Negativity pays off. If I wanted this column to go viral, I should have put an angry headline above it: ‘ALERT: Politics sends country straight into the ravine.’ Research shows that each additional negative word in a newspaper headline increases the chance that people will click on it by 2.3 percent. Social media provides moral-emotional language 20 percent more chance on distribution per word. Algorithms are built on attention and nothing generates as much attention as anger. Moral outrage produces a dopamine response in our brain.
If there is one domain where negativity works par excellence, it is politics. And this is perhaps the fundamental difference with science. When I moved to The Hague, a cartoon appeared de Volkskrant. On a thin staircase I descended from a small planet called Princeton into a large black hole entitled ‘Politics The Hague’.
Politics and science are in many ways mirror images of each other. Science likes to see itself as universal, precise, rational and win-win. When a researcher makes a discovery, others can build on it. Politics, on the other hand, is national or local, deliberately ambiguous – every politician knows that it is perilous to give a precise answer -, emotional and zero sum. The total number of Chamber seats remains 150. The gain of one party is the loss of the other.
But the biggest difference is in the basic attitude. Science is intrinsically optimistic. Every day we learn more, discover something new. Problems are cherished as opportunities for breakthroughs. A colleague has a poster hanging with “Mathematics is such a drama queen. She can’t possibly have so many problems.”
The opposite law applies in the Hague black hole. When a problem is intensively discussed, citizens actually think more negatively about it. More debate does not provide better understanding or a concrete solution, but rather more outrage and frustration. A crisis becomes a political revenue model.
Immigration is a good example of this. There is a good documented correlation between media attention to immigration and more negative public perceptions, regardless of actual figures. Citizens are often positive about concrete policy proposals, such as climate measures, but as soon as they are packaged politically, the mood changes. It is not the policy that makes things gloomy, but its politicalization.
The bitter thing is that precisely in areas where scientific progress is being made, such as green energy and medical innovation, the political mood is often negatively distorted. This is how people like to talk about the climate crisis and the healthcare crisis. We can solve problems, but the discussion about them makes us believe not. As in the famous cartoon of Gummbah: “Do you want to whine about it or do you want to solve it? About whining.”
Negative campaign messages are remembered better and have a stronger influence on voting behavior
The fact that negativity works is not a coincidence, but elementary psychology. Our brains have evolved to pay better attention to threats than opportunities. Anyone who did not see the poisonous snake in the bushes died. If you missed those nutritious berries, there was probably another bush further along. When we read political news, our heart rate increases when we hear negative news. That’s just how our brains are wired.
Politicians are all too aware of this. Negative campaign messages are remembered better and have a stronger influence on voting behavior. American presidential elections are often not a choice for a candidate, but in return for the alternative. That’s why usually the two most hated politicians are pitted against each other.
How do you break this spiral? Even a politician who wants to appear positive is quickly forced into sharpness and conflict by the media’s business models. Nuance is making a loss. It is unfortunate that political campaigns for a positive counter-narrative also work most effectively when they opt for a frontal attack and tackle the opponent head on. This way, even as a positive person, you are sucked into the black hole.
But let’s be honest: we easily point to politics, as if we ourselves are not addicted to negativity. Nothing connects like shared outrage – even about outrage culture, as in this column.
We like to be on the ‘right side’. We fulminate against disinformation and polarization. We share articles about how bad things are going: the failing politics, the sensationalist media, the backward education. The louder you warn, the higher your moral status. We cultivate an informed form of cynicism, but it is still cynicism.
Actual problems deserve a fair place, somewhere between the scientific ones drama queen and the political black hole. The American psychiatrist Theodore Rubin summed it up nicely: “The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is that we expect the opposite and think that having problems is a problem.”
There are many more subtle forms of negativity that we are all guilty of. We feel like victims of institutions that we think are too powerful: the failing government, megalomaniac tech companies. We harbor mistrust of fellow citizens we do not want to get to know. We give up hope because politics doesn’t change anything. We escape into our own bubble and only share our own views.
Here lies the painful truth: we are all, in one way or another, complicit in a culture of negativity.
Maybe breaking through this starts by asking some simple questions: Where did I see progress today? Who did something good? What did work? Not as naive optimism, but as a conscious correction to the pessimism that millions of years of survival struggle have ingrained in us. Of course we can also continue to complain about the complaining. That’s nice and safe. And it is guaranteed to yield more clicks.
