bad is stronger than good baumeister

Review of General Psychology2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370

Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation1089-2680/O1/S5.O0 DOI: 10.1037//1089-2680.5.4.323

Bad Is Stronger Than Good

Roy F. Baumeister and Ellen BratslavskyCase Western Reserve University

Catrin FinkenauerFree University of Amsterdam

Kathleen D. VohsCase Western Reserve University

The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major lifeevents (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interper-sonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedbackhave more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughlythan good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue goodones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant todisconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and sa-lience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still foundwhen such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power ofgood) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger thangood, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.

Centuries of literary efforts and religiousthought have depicted human life in terms of astruggle between good and bad forces. At themetaphysical level, evil gods or devils are theopponents of the divine forces of creation andharmony. At the individual level, temptationand destructive instincts battle against strivingsfor virtue, altruism, and fulfillment. "Good" and"bad" are among the first words and conceptslearned by children (and even by house pets),and most people can readily characterize almostany experience, emotion, or outcome as good orbad.

What form does this eternal conflict take inpsychology? The purpose of this article is toreview evidence pertaining to the general hy-

Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D.Vohs, Department of Psychology, Case Western ReserveUniversity; Catrin Finkenauer, Department of Psychology,Free University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Ellen Bratslavsky in now at the Department of Psychol-ogy, Ohio State University.

We thank the many people who have contributed helpfulcomments and references. This work is dedicated to thememory of Warren.

Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-dressed to Roy F. Baumeister or Kathleen D. Vohs, Depart-ment of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University,10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-7123. Elec-tronic mail may be sent to either [email protected] [email protected].

pothesis that bad is stronger than good (see alsoRozin & Royzman, in press). That is, eventsthat are negatively valenced (e.g., losingmoney, being abandoned by friends, and receiv-ing criticism) will have a greater impact on theindividual than positively valenced events ofthe same type (e.g., winning money, gainingfriends, and receiving praise). This is not to saythat bad will always triumph over good, spellingdoom and misery for the human race. Rather,good may prevail over bad by superior force ofnumbers: Many good events can overcome thepsychological effects of a single bad one. Whenequal measures of good and bad are present,however, the psychological effects of bad onesoutweigh those of the good ones. This may infact be a general principle or law of psycholog-ical phenomena, possibly reflecting the innatepredispositions of the psyche or at least reflect-ing the almost inevitable adaptation of eachindividual to the exigencies of daily life.

This pattern has already been recognized incertain research domains. This is probably mosttrue in the field of impression formation, inwhich the positive-negative asymmetry effecthas been repeatedly confirmed (e.g., Anderson,1965; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; Skowronski& Carlston, 1989). In general, and apart from afew carefully crafted exceptions, negative infor-mation receives more processing and contrib-

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324 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

utes more strongly to the final impression thandoes positive information. Learning somethingbad about a new acquaintance carries moreweight than learning something good, by andlarge.

In other spheres, the effect seems present butnot recognized. For example, nearly every psy-chology textbook teaches that propinquitybreeds attraction. This conclusion is based onthe landmark study by Festinger, Schachter, andBack (1950) in which the formation of friend-ships in a married students' dormitory wastracked over time. Contrary to elaborate hypoth-eses about similarity, role complementarity,values, and other factors, the strongest predictorof who became friends was physical propin-quity: Participants who lived closest to eachother were most likely to become friends.

Yet a lesser known follow-up by Ebbesen,Kjos, and Konecni (1976) found that propin-quity predicted the formation of disliking evenmore strongly than liking. Living near one an-other increased the likelihood that two peoplewould become enemies even more strongly thanit predicted the likelihood that they would be-come friends. Propinquity thus does not causeliking. More probably, it simply amplifies theeffect of other variables and events. Becausebad events are stronger than good ones, anidentical increase in propinquity produces moreenemies than friends.

The relative strength of bad may also berelevant to the topics studied by research psy-chologists. As president of the American Psy-chological Association, Martin Seligman (1999)called for a "positive psychology" movement tooffset the negative focus that he saw as domi-nating most of psychology's history. The nega-tive focus was first documented by Carlson's(1966) survey of psychology textbooks, inwhich he found twice as many chapters (121 vs.52) devoted to unpleasant as to pleasant emo-tions, and a similar imbalance was found inlines of coverage and use of specific words.More recently, Czapinski (1985) coded morethan 17,000 research articles in psychologyjournals and found that the coverage of negativeissues and phenomena exceeded positive, goodones 69% to 31%, a bias that was fairly strongacross all areas of psychology (although weak-est in social psychology). Seligman is probablyquite right in proposing that psychologists havefocused most of their theoretical and empirical

efforts on understanding the bad rather than thegood.

Why has this been so? Undoubtedly, onehypothesis might be that psychologists are pes-simistic misanthropes or sadists who derive per-verse satisfaction from studying human suffer-ing and failure. An alternative explanation,however, would be that psychology has con-sisted of young researchers trying to obtain pub-lishable findings in a relatively new science thatwas characterized by weak measures and highvariance. They needed to study the strongestpossible effects in order for the truth to shinethrough the gloom of error variance and toregister on their measures. If bad is strongerthan good, then early psychologists would in-evitably gravitate toward studying the negativeand troubled side of human life, whereas themore positive phenomena had to wait until therecent emergence of stronger methods, moresensitive measures, and better statisticaltechniques.

The goal of this review is to draw together theasymmetrical effects of bad and good across adeliberately broad range of phenomena. Even intopic areas in which this asymmetry has beenrecognized (as in impression formation), re-searchers have not generally linked it to patternsin other topic areas and may therefore haveoverlooked the full extent of its generality. Thepresent investigation is intended to providesome perspective on just how broadly valid it isthat bad is stronger than good. We certainly donot intend to claim that the greater power of badthings overrides all other principles of psychol-ogy. Other relevant phenomena may includecongruency effects (good goes with good; badgoes with bad) and self-aggrandizing patterns(bad can be avoided or transformed into good).Nevertheless, the general principle that bad isstronger than good may have important impli-cations for human psychology and behavior.

Definition implies rendering one concept interms of others, and the most fundamental onestherefore will resist satisfactory definition.Good, bad, and strength are among the mostuniversal and fundamental terms (e.g., Cassirer,1955; Osgood & Tzeng, 1990), and it could beargued that they refer to concepts that are un-derstood even by creatures with minimal lin-guistic capacity (such as small children andeven animals). By good we understand desir-able, beneficial, or pleasant outcomes including

BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 325

states or consequences. Bad is the opposite:undesirable, harmful, or unpleasant. Strengthrefers to the causal impact. To say that bad isstronger than good is thus to say that bad thingswill produce larger, more consistent, more mul-tifaceted, or more lasting effects than goodthings.

A Brief Discussion: Why Should Bad BeStronger Than Good?

Offering an explanation for the greater powerof bad than good is likely to be an inherentlydifficult enterprise. The very generality of thepattern entails that there are likely to be fewprinciples that are even more broad and general.Meanwhile, researchers will have found lowerlevel explanations that help explain why badmay be stronger than good with regard to spe-cific, narrowly defined phenomena.

From our perspective, it is evolutionarilyadaptive for bad to be stronger than good. Webelieve that throughout our evolutionary his-tory, organisms that were better attuned to badthings would have been more likely to survivethreats and, consequently, would have increasedprobability of passing along their genes. As anexample, consider the implications of foregoingoptions or ignoring certain possible outcomes.A person who ignores the possibility of a pos-itive outcome may later experience significantregret at having missed an opportunity for plea-sure or advancement, but nothing directly terri-ble is likely to result. In contrast, a person whoignores danger (the possibility of a bad out-come) even once may end up maimed or dead.Survival requires urgent attention to possiblebad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard togood ones. Hence, it would be adaptive to bepsychologically designed to respond to badmore strongly than good. After we review theevidence for the phenomenon of bad beingstronger than good, we present a more completediscussion of the theoretical reasons for thestrength of bad over good and also review othertheories that have been proposed in the contextof specific subareas (e.g., impression formation).

Evidence

The purpose of the following sections is toreview evidence pertaining to the central hy-

pothesis that bad is stronger than good. Toestablish the breadth of the pattern, we try toidentify many seemingly different and diversespheres in which bad is stronger than good.Given the breadth of the hypothesis, it is prob-ably not possible to cover every study that hasever found bad to be stronger than good in anysphere. We have, however, tried to cover asmuch as possible and to provide evidence forthe effect in as many different spheres as pos-sible. How did we accomplish this? Unlikemore focused narrative reviews or meta-analy-ses, we were unable to conduct a systematicsearch using keywords such as good or bad.Instead, we made an effort to cast as broad a netas possible and then focus our search on severalresearch areas. As part of this process, we madea request via e-mail to the members of theSociety for Personality and Social Psychologylist-serve. The roughly 100 responses receivedfrom these members served as a starting pointfor our search. After dividing our review intoseveral topic areas, we then set out to uncoverthose studies that compared the relative strengthof good and bad effects, especially those thatalso included a neutral control group.

The central goal of this review is to establishconvergence across multiple areas. The consis-tency of conclusions across each area is moreimportant than the robustness or methodologi-cal strength of evidence in each specific area.We attempt to do justice to each area, but ouremphasis is on breadth (and on the quest for anypatterns in the opposite direction), so it seemeddesirable to cover as many different areas aspossible.

Reacting to Events

All lives contain both good and bad events. Ifbad is stronger than good, then the bad eventswill have longer lasting and more intense con-sequences than good events. In particular, theeffects of good events should dissipate morerapidly than the effects of bad events. Thisshould occur despite the mechanisms describedby Taylor (1991), by which many people striveto minimize bad events and distance themselvesfrom them, although those minimizing pro-cesses should limit the impact of bad events andpossibly produce some contrary findings.

A widely accepted account of the impact oflife events was put forward by Helson (1964)


and called adaptation level theory. In this view,the impact of substantial changes in life circum-stances is temporary. People (and animals) reactmore to changes than to stable conditions, sothey are most sensitive to new conditions.Change, therefore, produces strong reactions,but the circumstances that result from thechange gradually cease to elicit a reaction andeventually become taken for granted. Applyingthis theory to human happiness, Brickman andCampbell (1971) postulated a "hedonic tread-mill" by which long-term happiness will remainroughly constant regardless of what happensbecause the impact of both good and bad eventswill wear off over time.

In testing the hedonic treadmill, however, itemerged that bad events wear off more slowlythan good events. Brickman, Coates, andJanoff-Bulman (1978) interviewed three groupsof respondents: people who had won a lottery,people who had been paralyzed in an accident,and people who had not recently experiencedany such major life event. The lottery wins andaccidents had occurred about 1 year before theinterview. Confirming the hypothesis for posi-tive events, the lottery winners did not reportgreater happiness than the two other groups.Brickman et al. proposed that this result wasdue to habituation, as the adaptation level phe-nomenon would predict: The euphoria over thelottery win did not last, and the winners' hap-piness levels quickly returned to what they hadbeen before the lottery win. Ironically, perhaps,the only lasting effect of winning the lotteryappeared to be the bad ones, such as a reductionin enjoyment of ordinary pleasures.

In contrast to the transitory euphoria of goodfortune, the accident victims were much slowerto adapt to their fate, Brickman et al. (1978)found. They rated themselves as significantlyless happy than participants in the control con-dition. The victims continued to compare theircurrent situation with how their lives had beenbefore the accident (unlike lottery winners, whodid not seem to spend much time thinking howtheir lives had improved from the bygone daysof relative poverty). Brickman et al. called thisphenomenon the "nostalgia effect" (p. 921).

The seeming implication of these findings isthat adaptation-level effects are asymmetrical,consistent with the view that bad is strongerthan good. Adaptation-level effects tend to pre-vent any lasting changes in overall happiness

and instead return people to their baseline. Aftera short peak in happiness, people become ac-customed to the new situation and are no morehappy than they were before the improvement.After a serious misfortune, however, people ad-just less quickly, even though many victimsultimately do recover (Taylor, 1983).

Comparison of unanticipated financial out-comes can equate the objective magnitude ofevents. Kahneman and Tversky (1984) had par-ticipants perform thought experiments in whichthey either gained or lost the same amount ofmoney. The distress participants reported overlosing some money was greater than the joy orhappiness that accompanied gaining the sameamount of money. Put another way, you aremore upset about losing $50 than you are happyabout gaining $50.

In a prospective study of stress in pregnantwomen, Wells, Hobfoll, and Lavin (1999) ex-amined gains and losses of resources early inpregnancy and measured postpartum outcomesincluding depression and anger. Gains in re-sources had no significant effects, but lossesproduced significant effects on postpartum an-ger (even after controlling for anger at the timeof initial measurement, which included anger atthe loss of resources). Wells et al. also foundthat effects of subsequent losses of resourceswere significantly higher among women whohad experienced the previous losses; whereas ifthey had not had the initial loss, the effect of thelater loss was muted. These findings point to asnowballing effect of consecutive bad out-comes. Good outcomes did not produce anysuch effects.

Developmental and clinical observationslikewise suggest that single bad events are farstronger than even the strongest good ones. Var-ious studies reveal long-term harmful conse-quences of child abuse or sexual abuse, includ-ing depression, relationship problems, revictim-ization, and sexual dysfunction, even if theabuse occurred only once or twice (Cahill,Llewelyn, & Pearson, 1991; Fleming, Mullen,Sibthorpe, & Bammer, 1999; Silver, Boon, &Stones, 1983; Styron & Janoff-Bulman, 1997;Weiss, Longhurst, & Mazure, 1999). These ef-fects seem more durable than any comparablepositive aspect of childhood, and it also seemsdoubtful (although difficult to prove) that a sin-gle positive event could offset the harm causedby a single episode of violent or sexual abuse;


whereas the single negative event can probablyundo the benefits of many positive interactions.

Sexuality offers a sphere in which relevantcomparisons can perhaps be made, insofar asgood sexual experiences are often regarded asamong the best and most intense positive expe-riences people have. Ample evidence suggeststhat a single bad experience in the sexual do-main can impair sexual functioning and enjoy-ment and even have deleterious effects onhealth and well-being for years afterward (seeLaumann, Gagon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994;Laumann, Paik, & Rosen, 1999; Rynd, 1988;note, however, that these are correlational find-ings and some interpretive questions remain).There is no indication that any good sexualexperience, no matter how good, can producebenefits in which magnitude is comparable tothe harm caused by such victimization.

Turning from major experiences to everydayactions, we find the same pattern of greaterpower for the unpleasant than the pleasantevents. A diary study by David, Green, Martin,and Suls (1997) examined the effects of every-day good and bad events, as well as personalitytraits. Undesirable (bad) events had more per-vasive effects on subsequent mood than desir-able (good) ones. Although each type of eventinfluenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad eventsinfluenced bad mood, and good events predictedgood mood) to similar degrees, bad events hadan additional effect on the opposite-valencemood that was lacking for good events. In otherwords, bad events influenced both good and badmoods, whereas good events influenced onlygood moods. Similar findings emerged whenDavid et al. compared neuroticism (associatedwith distress and negativity) and extraversion(associated with positivity). Neuroticism influ-enced both good and bad moods, whereas ex-traversion affected only good moods.

Further evidence of the greater power of badevents emerged from a 3-week longitudinalstudy by Nezlek and Gable (1999). Their par-ticipants furnished multiple measures of adjust-ment each day, as well as recording dailyevents. Bad events had stronger effects on ad-justment than good events on an everyday basis.The superior strength of bad events was consis-tent across their full range of measures of ad-justment, including self-esteem, anxiety, causaluncertainty, perceived control over the environ-

ment, and depressogenic cognitions about thefuture, the self, and life in general.

How long the impact of everyday events lastswas studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996).Bad events had longer lasting effects. In theirdata, having a good day did not have any no-ticeable effect on a person's well-being the fol-lowing day, whereas having a bad day did carryover and influence the next day. Specifically,after a bad day, participants were likely to havelower well-being on the next day. Although theresults are technically correlational, somethingmust cause them, whether it is the bad day itselfcausing the subsequent bad day or some othercause producing the consecutive pair of baddays. Either way, the bad has stronger powerthan good because only the bad reliably pro-duced consecutive bad days.

Even at the sensory level, bad events seem toproduce stronger reactions than good ones. Ex-pressive reactions to unpleasant, pleasant, andneutral odors were examined by Gilbert, Frid-lund, and Sabini (1987). Participants smelledvarious odors while alone, and their facial ex-pressions were videotaped. Raters then watchedthe tapes and tried to infer the odor from thefacial reaction. Unpleasant odors were most ac-curately classified, partly because more facialmovement was perceived in the unpleasant odortrials. Pleasant odors elicited more facial move-ment than neutral odors, but the neutral oneswere still rated more accurately than the posi-tive ones. Thus, responses to unpleasant odorswere apparently stronger, at least to the extentthat they could be accurately recognized byraters.

Perhaps the broadest manifestation of thegreater power of bad events than good to elicitlasting reactions is contained in the psychologyof trauma. The very concept of trauma hasproven broadly useful, and psychologists havefound it helpful in many different domains.Many kinds of traumas produce severe and last-ing effects on behavior, but there is no corre-sponding concept of a positive event that canhave similarly strong and lasting effects. In asense, trauma has no true opposite concept. Asingle traumatic experience can have long-termeffects on the person's health, well-being, atti-tudes, self-esteem, anxiety, and behavior; manysuch effects have been documented. In contrast,there is little evidence that single positive expe-riences can have equally influential conse-


quences. It is possible that such events havesimply eluded psychological study, but it seemsmore likely that the lack of an opposite conceptfor trauma indicates the greater power of badthan good single events to affect people.

Although the findings from Brickman et al.(1978) and others reviewed in this section pro-vide vivid and well-known indications that badevents produce stronger, more lasting reactionsthan good ones, some of the studies suffer froma possible asymmetry in the objective magni-tude of the event. There is no way to ascertainobjectively that winning a lottery is comparablein magnitude to becoming paralyzed by an ac-cident. The diary studies have the advantage ofhaving used all the events of the day, so theseare methodologically more useful. Most con-vincing are the studies that attempted to ensureequal objective magnitudes (such as when peo-ple gain vs. lose the same amount of money)because these permit the firmest conclusionsthat bad events produce stronger reactions.Therefore, throughout the rest of this review, weemphasize studies that either did manage toequate the good and the bad events in terms oftheir objective magnitude or that took somebroad, representative or exhaustive sample ofevents.

In summary, most findings indicate that peo-ple react more strongly to bad than good events.The evidence covers everything from minor ev-eryday events and brief experimental exposureto aversive odors to major life events and trau-mas. Bad events produce more emotion, havebigger effects on adjustment measures, andhave longer lasting effects.

Close Relationships

One of the central tasks and goals of humanlife is to sustain a network of close relationshipscharacterized by mutual caring and pleasant,supportive interactions (e.g., Baumeister &Leary, 1995). Unfortunately, many relation-ships fail to last, and others are sometimes lessthan satisfactory. In this section, we reviewevidence about good versus bad patterns thatcontribute to the long-term relationship out-comes. Obviously, one would expect that bad,destructive characteristics of the relationshipwill hasten its demise; whereas good, construc-tive ones will preserve it. The relevant predic-tion goes beyond that, however: The harmful

effects of the bad characteristics will exert moreinfluence over the relationship outcome than thebeneficial effects of the good characteristics.

People commonly believe that positivity ofcommunication (as opposed to negativity) isassociated with high relational satisfaction (e.g.,friendships, marriages, partnerships, and fami-lies). In general, research findings are consistentwith this assumption. People satisfied with theirrelationships communicate with more positiveverbal behaviors (e.g., agreement, confirmation,constructive problem solving, politeness, ex-pressing forgiveness) and nonverbal behaviors(e.g., smiling, head nodding, caring, or con-cerned voice; for more detailed descriptions ofthese behaviors, see Gottman, 1979; Riskin &Faunce, 1970; Rusbult, Johnson, & Morrow,1986; Stafford & Canary, 1991; Ting-Toomey,1983; Wills, Weiss, & Patterson, 1974). On thecontrary, people dissatisfied with their relation-ships communicate with more negative verbalbehaviors (e.g., insults, threats, or criticisms)and nonverbal behaviors (e.g., frowning orspeaking in a cold hard voice).

More important, however, positive and neg-ative communication have different impacts onrelational satisfaction, and the negative aremore decisive. To show this, John Gottman andhis colleagues (Gottman, 1979, 1994) video-taped married couples in the laboratory and athome as they talked about a wide variety oftopics such as how their day went, the nutri-tional value of certain foods, marital problemsin general, and specific conflicts in their rela-tionship. They then coded the couple's behav-iors in categories (e.g., verbal, nonverbal, pos-itive, and negative). The findings indicated thatthe presence or absence of negative behaviorswas more strongly related to the quality of cou-ples' relationships than the presence or absenceof positive behaviors. Positivity and negativitywere independent, in the sense that increasingone did not necessarily decrease the other. Theimportant implication is that increasing positivebehaviors in a relationship will not affect therelationship as much as decreasing negative be-haviors. In another study in which videotapedmarital interactions were used, Gottman andKrokoff (1989) found that negative interactionspredicted marital satisfaction more stronglythan positive interactions.

The effects of emotional interactions onchanges in relationship satisfaction were exam-


ined by Gottman and Levenson (1986; Leven-son & Gottman, 1983, 1985). They made vid-eotapes of couples interacting, then showed theinteraction tapes to the individuals and obtainedongoing ratings of affect through the interac-tion. Of particular interest were data on reci-procity, defined in terms of one person express-ing a similar emotion or change in emotion rightafter the partner had indicated similar feelings.Reciprocity of negative affect was especiallypotent and in particular was more influentialthan reciprocity of positive affect. The greaterinfluence of negative affect reciprocity wasfound with regard to differentiating happy ver-sus distressed marriages (Levenson & Gottman,1983). In a longitudinal follow-up 2 years later,the couples who had initially shown higher ratesof negative affect reciprocity reported greaterdeclines in relationship satisfaction, whereasreciprocity of positive affect had no significanteffect (Levenson & Gottman, 1985). In sum-mary, relationships are most affected by pat-terns in which one person responds negativelyto the other's negative act or feeling.

On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994)has proposed a revealing diagnostic index forevaluating relationships: He proposed that inorder for a relationship to succeed, positive andgood interactions must outnumber the negativeand bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratiofalls below that, the relationship is likely to failand breakup. This index converges well withthe thrust of our argument: Bad events are somuch stronger than good ones that the goodmust outnumber the bad in order to prevail.Gottman's index suggests that bad events are onaverage five times as powerful as good ones, atleast with regard to close relationships.

Constructive and destructive problem-solv-ing behavior patterns for relationships werestudied by Rusbult et al. (1986; see also Rusbult& Zembrodt, 1983). They were able to classifycouples as to the degree to which they usedconstructive and destructive approaches toproblems, and these were assessed indepen-dently so that a given couple might use both,either, or none. In a longitudinal design, Rusbultet al. showed that the destructive patterns weremore predictive of relationship outcomes thanconstructive ones were. In particular, destruc-tive responses to the partner's destructive re-sponses showed a greatly increased predictivepower. This finding confirms Levenson and

Gottman's (1985) conclusion that reciprocity ofbad responses is an especially potent predictorof relationship outcomes (and is stronger thanreciprocity of good responses). The implicationis that the long-term success of a relationshipdepends more on not doing bad things than ondoing good things.

A similar conclusion emerged from a recentlongitudinal study by Huston, Caughlin, Houts,Smith, and George (2001). By following cou-ples for more than a decade, they were able toascertain what features of early marital relation-ships predicted divorce (and other unhappi-ness) 10 to 12 years later. Huston et al. foundthat levels of negativity and distress early in themarriage were higher among the later divorcingcouples than among the happily married ones.Positive relations during the early years of mar-riage, including love and affectional communi-cation, did not differ significantly between theones who ended up divorcing and those whoended up happily married. Without random as-signment to early marital conflict (a technicaland ethical impossibility), it is difficult to drawa firm causal inference from these data. It alsoremains possible that the early distress reflectedsome underlying conflict or even personalityproblem among the later divorcing spouses, buteven that conclusion would fit the view that badis stronger than good.

Even stronger results emerged from a 2-yearlongitudinal study by Huston and Vangelisti(1991). They measured three types of socio-emotionally expressive behavior among newly-wed couples: affectionate communication, sex-ual interest, and negativity. Sexual affection hadno relation to marital satisfaction, and giving orreceiving affection had only weak and inconsis-tent relationships to satisfaction. In contrast,negativity had strong and consistent links toglobal marital satisfaction. Thus, people's sat-isfaction with their marriage depended muchmore heavily on the bad parts (negativity) thanon the good parts (affection and sex).

In support of this idea, sexual dysfunctionwas found to have a greater effect on the maritalbond than good sexual functioning. McCarthy(1999) reported that when sexuality functionswell within a marriage, it accounts for 15-20%of the variance in the marital bond, but whensex functioning is bad or nonexistent (whichmost married couples would consider a badstate), it accounts for 50-75% of the variance.


The power of bad sexual experiences, then, faroutweighs the benefits of good sexual experi-ences within a marriage.

One factor that may contribute to some ofthese effects is that destructive behaviors areunderstood better than constructive ones.Acitelli, Douvan, and Veroff (1993) found thatduring the early years of marriage, couples per-ceived and understood each other's destructivebehaviors better than the constructive ones.Acitelli et al. interpreted this as based on thegreater visibility and recall of bad, destructivebehaviors. As Kellermann (1984) has noted,however, such explanations are not theoreticallycomplete because they fail to say why badevents are more readily noticed and recalled.

Daily reports of spousal behaviors and mari-tal satisfaction were made for 2 weeks by par-ticipants in a study by Wills et al. (1974). Of theamount of variance (in marital satisfaction) thatthe predictor variables were able to explain inregression analyses, the majority (65%) wascaptured by the aversive, displeasurable behav-iors. This was significantly greater than theamount explained by supportive, pleasurablebehaviors (25%). This was true despite the factthat there were about three times as many pos-itive behaviors as aversive ones. The greaterpower of the bad behaviors had to overcometheir lesser number in order to produce a stron-ger effect.

Reciprocation patterns were also examinedby Wills et al. (1974). Interspouse correlationsindicated that negative, displeasurable behav-iors were reciprocated to a significant degree,whereas the reciprocation of positive, pleasur-able behaviors was weaker and not significant.This is an important step toward explaining thegreater power of bad events to affect relation-ship outcomes: The couples' subsequent inter-actions are apparently more directly and consis-tently affected by bad than good behaviors. Aswith the daily events reviewed in the precedingsection, couple interactions continue to be af-fected by bad more than good.

The relative contributions of stress (negativefactors), social support (positive), and resources(positive) to the quality of family life wereassessed in an extensive telephone survey byPittman and Lloyd (1988). Both marital satis-faction and parental satisfaction were morestrongly affected by the bad events (i.e., thestresses) than by the positive (i.e., support and

resources). Thus, negativity and stress addedmore than 20% to the amount of variance inmarital satisfaction that was explained, whereaspositive support and resources added only 5%.

All in all, the evidence is fairly clear andunanimous in indicating that relationships aremore affected by bad events than good ones. Asseen in daily interactions, broad patterns, affectof problem solving, and marital communica-tion, bad events have stronger effects than goodevents. Reciprocation of bad responses appearsto be especially powerful for leading to deteri-oration and breakup of close relationships.

Other Relationships and Interactions

Although close relationships have receivedthe greatest amount of study, there is also somerelevant information regarding not-so-close re-lationships and other forms of interpersonal in-teraction. We report several such studies here,although the research on formation of initialimpressions is covered in a separate sectionlater in the article.

Sociometric studies have examined how in-dividuals perceive each other within establishedgroups or social networks. If bad is strongerthan good, then dislike and social rejectionshould be more pronounced, which would bereflected in higher agreement throughout thesocial network. A meta-analysis of sociometricstudies of children recently confirmed this con-clusion (Newcomb, Bukowski, & Pattee, 1993).In particular, the two social extremes were rep-resented by the highly popular children and therejected children, and these were about the sameproportions (9% and 12% of the groups, respec-tively, on average). Consistency of reportsacross the children, as well as for self-reportsand for ratings by teachers and parents, washigher for the rejected than for the popularchildren. In other words, all perspectives agreemore about who is rejected than about who ispopular.

Another approach to the same problem is toexamine the link between naming someone as"best friend" or "worst enemy" and overall rat-ings of ability. An ambitious study by French,Waas, and Tarver-Behring (1986) obtained ex-tensive sociometric data from 250 third- andfourth-grade children. All children listed theirthree most and least desired friends, as well aslisting the three best and worst peers at sports


and at schoolwork. All children then rated ev-eryone in their class in terms of friendship,sports, and schoolwork. The proportion of vari-ance shared by the two methods was consis-tently higher for the bad than for the good; thatis, low ratings led to more frequent nominationsas "undesirable friend," "bad at sports," and"bad at schoolwork" more reliably than highratings led to more frequent nominations as"desirable friend," "good at sports," and "goodat school."

Undoubtedly the initial acts in an interactioncreate expectancies and set the tone for furtherones, and if subsequent acts differ, the expect-ancies are violated. The impact of these wasassessed by Afifi and Burgoon (2000), who hadparticipants observe a videotaped interaction.Their research design included changes frominitially negative to positive and from initiallypositive to negative interactions. These violatedexpectancies produced strong reactions, but theviolations in the negative direction had strongereffects on attraction. Their finding that changesproduced stronger reactions than consistent in-terpersonal behavior replicated an earlier dem-onstration by Aronson and Linder (1965), butAfifi and Burgoon's work clearly showed thatthe shift toward the negative has a more pow-erful effect than the comparable shift toward thepositive. That is, the largest change in attractionoccurred when the stimulus person on the vid-eotape started off by behaving in a friendly,interested manner and then turned aloof andunfriendly.

A further investigation by Reyes et al. (1999)showed that both social attraction and sexualdesire were more strongly influenced by nega-tive, unpleasant social interactions than by pos-itive, pleasant ones. Participants who behavedin the unpleasant style produced clear (negative)reactions that were stronger than the reactions topeople who showed a positive, friendly interac-tion style.

The notion that bad is stronger than good insocial interactions received a fairly explicit testin a recent study. Exline and Baumeister (1999)had people play prisoner's dilemma against asimulated opponent who was randomly pro-grammed to start off with either a cooperative(good) or a defensive/exploitative (bad) move.When participants were asked to rate their op-ponent, the one who started off with the badmove was rated as stronger than the one who

started off with the cooperative move. Partici-pants also rated the bad opponent as strongerthan they themselves were, unlike the coopera-tive opponent.

In fact, when Baumeister and Leary (1995)reviewed the evidence in support of a need tobelong, they concluded that that need was fornonnegative interactions, rather than positiveones as they had originally theorized. The rea-son was that neutral interactions seemed ade-quate to satisfy the need to belong in manycases. This too confirms the greater power ofbad: The effects of positive, good interactionswere not consistently different from the effectsof neutral interactions, whereas bad ones wereclearly different from the neutral.

Emotion

The distinction between good and bad (pleas-ant and unpleasant) emotions is well establishedin psychology and familiar to nearly everyone.Although laypersons typically regard these asopposites, there is some evidence that the twoare somewhat independent (e.g., Watson & Tel-legen, 1985), and indeed measures of affectintensity (e.g., Larsen, Diener, & Emmons,1986) rest on the assumption that positive andnegative emotions can be positively correlatedwithin person, even though a person does notnormally feel both at the same time. Diener,Larsen, Levine, and Emmons (1985) concludedthat the seeming independence is produced by acombination of positive correlations in affectiveintensity and negative correlations in frequency.In any case, it is possible to compare positiveand negative emotional states against neutralones. The prediction is that negative affect andemotional distress will have stronger effectsthan positive affect and pleasant emotions, evenwhen the two emotional states or traits areequally distant from the neutral position.

Language provides one index of relativepower, although naturally language is subject tomultiple determinants. To the extent that nega-tive emotions are more powerful and important,they should be more fully represented in thelanguage. Sure enough, there appear to be morewords for negative than positive emotions.Averill (1980) constructed a Semantic Atlas ofEmotional Concepts by an exhaustive compila-tion of 558 emotion words. When he had par-ticipants rate them, he found that there were one


and one-half times as many negative terms aspositive ones (i.e., 62% negative vs. 38% posi-tive), which differed significantly from the nullhypothesis that there would be 50% of each.Averill also had three judges sort Anderson's(1965) list of 555 personality traits into emo-tional and nonemotional traits. He then evalu-ated them according to whether they fell aboveor below the midpoint on Anderson's originallikeableness ratings. Among the nonemotionaltraits, there was a small preponderance of pos-itive traits (57%), but among the emotionaltraits, the negative ones were in a clear majority(74%). Clearly, then, there are more words forbad emotions than for good ones.

A similar conclusion emerged (although tan-gentially) from a study by Van Goozen andFrijda (1993). They instructed participants insix different European countries and Canada towrite down as many emotion words as theycould think of within 5 min. The researchersthen tallied the 12 most frequently mentionedwords in each country. They reported that joy,sadness, anger, and fear (three of which arenegative) were the ones that made all six coun-tries' lists of the top dozen. If surprise, excite-ment, and crying are all treated as neutral (be-cause they can be either positive or negative),all the countries except The Netherlands hadmore negative than positive words among thetop dozen. Thus, when people try to think ofemotion terms, they come up with a preponder-ance of words referring to negative emotions.This too suggests that bad emotions are moreimportant to label and discuss than goodemotions.

Other work has confirmed that there are manymore words to indicate negative emotionalstates and differentiate among them than is thecase for positive emotional states (Clore & Or-tony, 1988; Russell, Fernandez-Dols, Manstead,& Wellenkamp, 1995). Thus, negative wordsappear to be more varied than positive words, orat least people seem to find it more important torecognize and label the distinctions betweenthem.

Another sign of the relative power of badversus good emotions is evident in research onaffect regulation. People often try to changetheir moods and have many techniques for do-ing so. Naturally, there is an asymmetry to theirgoals: for purely hedonic reasons, people preferto avoid bad emotions and obtain good ones.

Those two goals can be separated, however, andone can examine the relative frequency andnumber of techniques for each. Doing so yieldsa clear difference: There are many more tech-niques people use for escaping bad moods thanfor inducing good ones. Baumeister, Heather-ton, and Tice (1994) noted that there are sixpossible categories of affect regulation, consist-ing of efforts to induce, prolong, or terminateeither a pleasant or an unpleasant state. Ofthese, however, efforts to terminate the unpleas-ant states are by far the most frequently re-ported. The fact that people exert disproportion-ate amounts of energy trying to escape from badmoods (and in particular more than they exert toinduce good moods) is consistent with the hy-pothesis of greater power of negative emotions.

The effect of induced good and bad moods oncognitive processing (in connection with stereo-types) was studied by Esses and Zanna (1995).Across four studies, they consistently found thatbad moods had a bigger impact than goodmoods, in terms of the discrepancies from theneutral mood condition. In some of the studies,this could be ascribed to a weaker differenceamong the mood manipulations. In Experi-ment 4, for example, the manipulation checkson self-reported moods did not yield any signif-icant difference between the neutral and goodmood induction conditions. In Experiments 2and 3, the neutral mood condition yieldedmoods closer to the positive than the negativemood condition. In Experiment 1, however, themanipulation checks showed that the two moodmanipulations were about equally far apart: Interms of the autobiographical narrative in themood induction, the pleasantness of the posi-tive, neutral, and negative conditions was 2.25,-.03, and -2.21, respectively, and the self-re-ported moods were 1.79,0.69, and -.49. Despitethe apparently equal departure in mood from theneutral condition baseline, the bad mood induc-tion produced bigger effects on ethnic outgroupstereotypes: Only the negative mood inductionproduced stereotypes that differed significantlyfrom the neutral mood baseline. Thus, whengood and bad moods were equidistant from theneutral control, the bad moods were found tohave the stronger effects.

Recall for positive versus negative emotionswas studied by Thomas and Diener (1990), whocompared diary and experience sampling dataagainst the same people's general estimates of


their emotional experiences. They found thatpeople tended to underestimate the frequency ofpositive affect, but not negative affect, which isconsistent with the view that the relative weak-ness of positive emotional experiences makesthem more forgettable. (It may also be, how-ever, that positive affect is so much more fre-quent than negative affect and that the greaterfrequency accounts for the relative underesti-mation. Then again, Thomas and Diener didfind that people were fairly accurate in estimat-ing the ratio of relative frequency of positiveversus negative affect.)

Likewise, recall for emotional events appearsto favor bad ones. Finkenauer and Rime" (1998)asked people to recall a recent, important emo-tional event that they had either shared withothers or kept secret. Although both positiveand negative emotional events were welcome,and both were recalled, people reported farmore bad than good events, by about a four-to-one margin across two studies. Thus, eventsinvolving bad emotions remain more salient onpeople's minds than events involving goodemotions.

People's estimations of how long or intenselyvarious events will affect them has been termedaffective forecasting (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson,Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). Gilbert et al.found that, in general, people overestimate theextent to which events in their lives will affectthem. Moreover, the data reveal that this phe-nomenon is stronger for negative events than forpositive ones. These data suggest that peoplehave a cognitive heuristic that informs them thatnegative events are powerful influences on sub-sequent affective states, more so than positiveevents, and therefore will affect them longer.

Children's understanding of emotional con-cepts was studied by Laible and Thompson(1998) in relation to attachment style. Not sur-prisingly, secure attachment was linked to betteremotional understanding in the sample (age 2.5to 6 years), but this effect was mainly foundwith negative emotions. Positive emotions wereunderstood about the same in the various cate-gories. The opposite finding might have beenexpected, given that secure attachment is pre-sumably associated with more experiences ofpositive rather than negative emotions, but theresults fit the pattern of bad emotions beingstronger (or at least more important) than goodones. Laible and Thompson speculated that the

effects were due to the greater need amongnonsecurely attached (such as avoidant) chil-dren to avoid negative, unpleasant emotions,with the result that they are slower to develop anunderstanding of them. This interpretation wasadmittedly speculative. Still, it does rest on theassumption that bad emotions are more impor-tant than good ones, so children who do nothave optimal attachment patterns find it moreimportant to downplay bad emotions than tofocus on good ones.

The emotional traits of positive and negativeaffectivity were studied by Major, Zubek, Coo-per, Cozzarelli, and Richards (1997) in terms oftheir effects on adjustment following abortion.A commendable feature of Major et al.'s designis that they measured positive and negative out-comes separately, allowing for subjective well-being and personal distress to be assessed inde-pendently. Well-being was predicted by bothpositive and negative affectivity, and withroughly equal power. Distress, however, wasonly predicted by negative affectivity. Thus,negative affect influenced both outcome mea-sures, whereas positive affect influenced onlyone.

There is also evidence that bad moods elicitmore thorough and careful information process-ing than good moods (e.g., Clore, Schwarz, &Conway, 1994; Schwarz, 1990). These findingsare consistent with Taylor's (1991) view thatnegative information stimulates a special set ofprocesses designed to cope with threat. Yeteven when a person is not threatened, badmoods seem to lead to greater processing. Forexample, Bless, Hamilton, and Mackie (1992)induced good and bad moods and then pre-sented to participants information about some-one else. They found that participants in goodmoods tended to cluster information and pro-cess it superficially, whereas people in badmoods processed it more carefully. Forgas(1992) extended this work to study the effects ofgood and bad moods on information about peo-ple who either conform to prototypes (stereo-types) or violate them (e.g., the engineer who isvs. the engineer who is not interested in foot-ball). The strongest mood effect involved thebad mood and the atypical, nonconforming per-son, which is precisely the combination thatalso elicited the most processing.

An exception to the general pattern of thor-ough, careful information processing during bad


moods was provided by Leith and Baumeister(1996). They focused mainly on high-arousalbad moods, in contrast to most prior work thathas emphasized low-arousal moods such as sad-ness. Leith and Baumeister did, however, repli-cate the greater processing among sad partici-pants. They found that highly aroused, aversivemoods led participants to curtail informationprocessing and make snap decisions whenchoosing what level of risk to choose (see alsoKeinan, 1987). Although this result did not con-form to the general pattern of greater processingwith bad moods, Leith and Baumeister stillfound that bad was stronger than good. Thehighly aroused, unhappy participants showeddistinctive patterns of high-risk and self-defeat-ing behavior, whereas good-mood participantsdid not differ from neutral-mood controlparticipants.

Thus, there is an assortment of evidence thatnegative affect is stronger and more importantthan positive affect. People have more wordsfor bad emotions than good ones and use themmore frequently. Bad emotions generally pro-duce more cognitive processing and have othereffects on behavior that are stronger than posi-tive emotions. People try harder to avoid andescape bad moods than to induce or prolonggood moods, and they remember bad moodsand emotions better.

Learning

Learning refers to behavioral or cognitivechange resulting from situational contingencies.Reinforcement and punishment are the twomain kinds of situational feedback that producelearning. Given the extensive research traditionin the study of learning, one might expect thatthe relative power of reward and punishmentwould be well established, but in fact we foundit difficult to locate much in the way of directcomparisons. One reason is that most learningresearch has been performed with rats, in whichfood pellets are used for rewards and electricshock for punishments, and it is difficult tocalibrate these so as to establish how many foodpellets are equivalent to how many shocks.

Still, some researchers have examined therelative power of reward and punishment. Inseveral older studies, researchers compared theeffectiveness of reward-and-punishment contin-gencies on discriminative learning of tasks that

require an active response from participants (incontrast with tasks that require the inhibition ofa response). The punishment of incorrect re-sponses (by the presentation of an aversivestimulus on mistakes) was consistently found tobe more effective than the reward of correctresponses: Punishment led to faster learningthan reward, across a variety of punishmentsand rewards. Penney and Lupton (1961) andPenney (1968) used a loud tone as punishment,and Meyer and Offenbach (1962) and Spence(1966) used verbal punishments ("Wrong").Spence and Segner (1967) compared nonverbaland verbal punishments (i.e., loud tone and"Wrong") with nonverbal and verbal rewards(i.e., candy and "Correct") and found that learn-ing with both types of punishment contingen-cies led to superior learning as compared withlearning with either type of reward contingen-cies. In other words, people learned morequickly from bad events (punishment) thanfrom good ones (reward).

This work was extended in methodologicallyrigorous ways by Costantini and Hoving (1973).Children in the reward condition received anempty container and were instructed to win asmany marbles as possible by doing a good jobon different performance tasks (e.g., matchidentical figures). Children in the punishmentcondition received a container full of marblesand were instructed to lose as few marbles aspossible by doing a good job on different per-formance tasks. This procedure is noteworthybecause it equates reward and punishment in animportant sense, insofar as the same number ofmarbles was contingent on performance. Theonly difference was that the child would gainmarbles for success in one condition but losemarbles for errors in the other condition. (Incontrast, the procedure of comparing candy re-wards vs. loud noise punishments is susceptibleto question about whether the rewards and pun-ishments were of equal magnitude.) BecauseCostantini and Hoving were interested in howwell children could learn to inhibit responses,the measures consisted of (a) walking as slowlyas possible over a board lying on the floor and(b) waiting as long as possible to tell the exper-imenter after discovering matched animals. Forboth tasks, punishment contingencies (losingmarbles) resulted in longer, more effective in-hibition of responses than reward contingencies.


To explain these results, Costantini and Hov-ing (1973) suggested that the motivation toavoid losing something is greater than the mo-tivation of gaining something. In our view, thisconclusion is another way of saying that bad isstronger than good.

To examine whether the effectiveness of pun-ishment on learning varies across developmen-tal stages, Tindall and Ratliff (1974) conducteda study among 540 first (6.4 years), fourth (9.4years), and eighth graders (13.5 years). Childrenwere assigned to three conditions. In the rewardcondition, they received a token for correct re-sponses (correctly identifying a particular fig-ure). In the punishment condition, children wereexposed to a loud noise for incorrect responses.In the reward-punishment condition, they re-ceived both a token for a correct response and aloud noise for an incorrect response. Children inthe punishment condition performed signifi-cantly better than children in the reward and thereward-punishment conditions, with no signif-icant difference between the two latter condi-tions. A main effect for developmental stagerevealed that eighth graders performed betterthan the first and fourth graders, but develop-mental stage did not show any interaction withexperimental condition, suggesting that punish-ment is relatively more effective than rewardacross all grade levels.

Textbooks in learning and education some-times assert that reward is better than punish-ment for learning, but they do not provide aclear basis for this assertion. The assertion itselfwould provide an important contradiction to thegeneral pattern of bad being stronger than good.Yet they may assert the superiority of rewardover punishment because of various side effectsof punishment, such as aggravation, anger, andeven disorientation, any of which could inter-fere with optimal learning. Such interferencecould even occur because bad events are stron-ger than good ones and because bad eventsproduce side effects, whereas good ones do not.In any case, the studies we have reviewed showthat punishment is stronger than reward. Wewere not able to find studies showing theopposite.

Another way of testing the relative power ofgood versus bad in learning is to compare ap-proach (good) and avoidance (bad) patterns. Inan overview of the early research on these is-sues, Miller (1944) noted that both approach

tendencies and avoidance tendencies growstronger as the object becomes nearer, but one"fundamental principle" from many studies wasthat "the strength of avoidance increases morerapidly with nearness than does that of ap-proach" (p. 433). Put another way, the avoid-ance gradient is steeper than the comparableapproach gradient, which indicates the superiorpower of bad. Miller cited experimental studiesby Brown (1940) that provided direct, precisetests of these variables, such as the examinationof how hard rats would pull against a restraint inorder to approach or avoid some stimulus. Insome studies, Brown used both strong and weakversions of both the reinforcers and punishers,but even so the avoidance gradient for theweaker punisher was steeper than the approachgradient for the stronger reinforcer (see Miller,1944, p. 435).

A similar conclusion was reached, in whichhuman beings and different methods were used,by Kahneman and Tversky (1982). They exam-ined the relationship between subjective andobjective values of various possible outcomes,which they termed the value function. In gen-eral, Kahneman and Tversky concluded that thevalue function is steeper for losses than forgains. A given increase in possible loss there-fore has a bigger impact on a decision than anobjectively equal increase in possible gain.

One of the few ways to make reward andpunishment comparable is to use money: Re-search participants receive money for some be-haviors and lose money for others, and if theamounts are identical, one can establish whichis stronger. This strategy was used by research-ers in an approach-avoidance situation in con-nection with wagering and gambling. Atthowe(1960) had people choose among various pos-sible wagers to see how their preferences var-ied. Some people were completely rational, inthe sense of consistently making the choiceswith the best expected value. Others departedfrom rationality in either direction. The "con-servative" individuals were defined by Atthoweas those whose choices reflected "an overcon-cern with the possibility of losing money"(1960, p. 4; thus, for them, bad was strongerthan good). In contrast, people showing the"extravagance" pattern showed the oppositemotivation, in which they emphasized the pos-sibility of gain and disregarded the possibility ofloss. Among the people in Atthowe's study who


were consistently nonrational in their choices,the vast majority (83%) fell into the conserva-tive (i.e., loss-avoiding instead of gain-pursu-ing) category. Moreover, across the entire sam-ple, the majority (71%) of all nonrationalchoices were conservative.

Similar findings with a different task werereported by J. L. Myers, Reilly, and Taub(1961): Choices were more affected by thechance of losing than by the chance of gainingmoney. Thus, although there does exist a mi-nority of behavior that is driven more by seek-ing gains than by avoiding losses, the clear andconsistent majority is primarily motivated bythe effort to avoid loss, which implies that formost people, bad is stronger than good when itcomes to financial outcomes.

Food likes and dislikes are among the mostclear-cut and immediate reactions in humans.Pavlovian associative learning offers an expla-nation for the association between food andliking. In animal studies, it has been demon-strated that the flavor of a certain food (condi-tional stimulus) becomes intrinsically dislikedafter contingent presentation of this flavor withan unconditioned stimulus that produces nauseaor vomit-producing reactions (Garcia & Koel-ling, 1966). This effect is known as conditionedtaste aversion learning.

The relative power of good and bad associ-ates in taste learning among human beings wasinvestigated by Baeyens, Eelen, Van den Bergh,and Crombez (1990). Artificial flavors that wereinitially neutral in valence were paired witheither an aversive, distasteful substance (Tween20polysorbate 20) or a pleasant-tasting substance(sugar). After about 12 trials, the bad stimulushad induced participants to dislike the artificialflavors, and these effects were still discerniblein a follow-up measure 1 week later. The pleas-ant stimulus failed to induce participants to likethe flavors any better, nor was there any signif-icant effect on the delayed measure. Thus, thebad stimulus had a stronger effect than the goodone, in terms of learning.

Thus, there are several findings indicatingthat learning and conditioning are more stronglyaffected by bad things than good, even when theobjective magnitude of good and bad is pre-cisely equated. People appear to be predisposedto learn more rapidly and easily about the cor-relates of negative than of positive events.

Neurological Processes

Some evidence suggests that responses in thebrain are stronger to bad than good things. Bar-tholow, Fabiani, Gratton, and Bettencourt(1999) examined event-related brain potentials(ERPs) in response to participants reading aboutpeople performing acts that were either consis-tent or inconsistent with personality descrip-tions. Larger amplitude P300 responses wereobserved following negative inconsistencies(i.e., people with positive traits performing badbehaviors) than positive inconsistencies (peoplewith bad traits performing good behaviors).These amplitudes reflect degree of informationprocessing and thus are consistent with the ev-idence of greater information processing.

Even more dramatic evidence comes fromstudies linking brain responses to learning andextinction of fear responses. Apparently fear-inducing events leave indelible memory tracesin the brain (LeDoux, Romanski, & Xagoraris,1989; Quirk, Repa, & LeDoux, 1995). Evenafter the behavioral response to a fear-inducingconditioned stimulus has been extinguished, thebrain retains a changed pattern of neuronal fir-ing in response to that stimulus and of neuronalconnections between cells (Quirk et al., 1995;Sanghera, Rolls, & Roper-Hall, 1979).

In an investigation of the effect of reactiontimes during a forced-choice paradigm foundthat even patients with brain damage are af-fected by different types of feedback (Gauggel,Wietasch, Bayer, & Rolko, 2000). Brain-dam-aged patients with varying etiologies displayedfaster reaction times after (false) negative feed-back (an effect that remained even when statis-tically controlling for depression), suggestingthat even among patients with profound braindamage, bad still outweighs good.

The existence of a specific brain mechanismto detect self-generated errors (Luu et al., 2000)also suggests that the brain is wired to reactmore strongly to bad than good. Errors andmistakes are, obviously, unintended responsesand hence are more likely to lead to bad out-comes than good outcomes. Research confirmsthe existence of a neurological process that rec-ognizes self-initiated errors. For instance, stud-ies in which participants are asked to makecontinued response adjustments have shownthat participants know they have made an error,even in the absence of feedback (e.g., Rabbitt,


1966). Moreover, there is a discernible changein the electrophysiological state of the brain thatoccurs soon after an error is made (within 80-100 ms). This brain response is measured byusing ERP methods and is called error-relatednegativity (ERN). The results of another ERPstudy also support the existence of a neuralmarker for error detection (Miltner, Braun, &Coles, 1997). Using ERP methods, Miltner etal. found a pattern in the anterior cingulate—aneurological substrate thought to be central toself-regulatory abilities (see Posner, 1994)—similar to the negative pattern reported by Luu,Collins, & Tucker (2000). Moreover, Miltner etal. saw this neurological marker across threedifferent sensory modalities (visual, auditory,and somatosensory), suggesting that our brainshave a generic system for recognizing self-ini-tiated errors.

Recently it has been suggested that ERN may"represent a means of tracking human self-mon-itoring in real time" (p. 45, Luu et al., 2000). Itis noteworthy that errors, which themselves arebad (because they are unintended responses)and which are strongly linked to aversive con-sequences, appear to have a neurological corre-late; whereas there does not seem to be ananalogous neurological reaction for correctresponses.

The effect of negative versus positive stimulion neurological indices of evaluative categori-zation also supports our proposition that badoutweighs good. Using ERP methodology, Ito,Cacioppo, and Lang (1998) found that brainactivation consistent with operations at the eval-uative categorization stage changed as a func-tion of the pleasantness and unpleasantness ofvisual images participants were viewing. Acrosstwo experiments, larger amplitude brain re-sponses were found when viewing negative ver-sus positive stimuli. Moreover, this effect oc-curred despite equating positive and negativestimuli with respect to probability, evaluativeextremity, and arousal. That there were valance-related differences at the evaluative categoriza-tion stage (as opposed to the output stage, forexample) indicates that bad outweighs good at amotivational level.

Although the evidence has only begun accru-ing, it suggests that the brain responds morestrongly to bad than good things and that itretains the memory of bad things, even whenthe behavioral response has undergone extinc-

tion. The extinction of a fear response is there-fore not a genuine case of unlearning, it merelyreflects a behavioral adaptation. The organismretains the readiness to respond with fear again,so subsequent relearning of the fear responsewould be facilitated. Clearly, this would be anadaptive pattern insofar as once a threat is rec-ognized, the person or animal will rememberthe threat more or less forever.

Child Development

Fairly little work is available to examine therelative power of good versus bad events onchild development. An authoritative work bythe eminent developmentalist Scarr (1992) di-rectly addressed the effects of good versus badenvironments on child development. She pro-posed that normal development depends onhaving an environment that falls within the nor-mal range. Anything outside that range impairsdevelopment. Scarr cited "violent, abusive, andneglectful families" (1992, p. 5) as examples ofsuch environments that can harm child devel-opment. The thrust of Scarr's argument was thathaving exceptionally good parents or a positiveenvironment would not produce any better de-velopment than having average parents and anaverage environment; whereas having bad par-ents or a bad environment can inflict lastingharm. Thus, only the bad, and not the good, canproduce effects that go beyond the average ornormal.

Perhaps the most conclusive data come fromcognitive and intellectual development. It isfairly well established that intelligence (IQ) isconsistently correlated with social class, as wellas being strongly influenced by genes and he-redity (e.g., Jensen, 1998). The correlation withsocial class can be interpreted as fitting severaldifferent causal hypotheses, and indeed the con-troversial work by Herrnstein and Murray(1994) proposed that IQ is a decisive determi-nant of social class, because low intelligenceleads to lower success in life. Other authorshave, however, emphasized the opposite causaldirection, proposing that social class affects IQ,either through the good effects of a well-offfamily or the harmful effects of growing up in apoor, disadvantaged environment.

Any effect of rich or poor families has toovercome the strong genetic contribution to IQ.Recently, some researchers have begun to ex-


amine how the relative contributions of natureand nurture (operationalized in terms of geneticheredity vs. shared family environment) maychange as a function of social class. This per-mits a rather precise comparison of whether badis stronger than good: Does the family environ-ment overcome the genetic contribution moreeffectively in good or poor families? Put an-other way, one assumes that children start offwith a genetic blueprint for a certain level ofintelligence, and the crucial questions arewhether good parents can increase their chil-dren's IQ above that level, whether poor parentscan decrease their children's IQ below thatsame level, or both.

The educational level of parents was selectedfor investigation by Rowe, Jacobson, and Vanden Oord (1999). Consistent with the view thatbad is stronger than good, they found that theinfluence of family educational level (relative toheredity) was stronger at the low end. Moreprecisely, the genetic heritability of intelligence(IQ) was strong and significant among highlyeducated families but was weak and nonsignif-icant among poorly educated families. The ef-fects of shared environment on children's IQshowed the complementary pattern, with theeffect of the shared family environment ap-proaching zero among the highly educated fam-ilies but having an appreciable and significanteffect among the poorly educated families.Thus, a relatively poor family environment wasable to overcome the genetic contribution tointelligence, but the good family environmenthad no effect and simply allowed the genes todetermine the children's intelligence. Parentscan make their genetically bright children lessintelligent, but they cannot apparently maketheir unintelligent ones (or any others) smarter.

Similar results were obtained in anotherstudy using father's occupational level. Amongthe occupationally successful fathers, children'sIQ depended mainly on genetic heredity,whereas with less successful fathers the familyenvironment effect was strong and the geneticcontribution was minimal (Thompson, Tiu, &Detterman, 1999). These findings convergewith those of Rowe et al. (1999) and indicatethat the effects of parenting and other environ-mental experiences on children are mainly neg-ative: Bad family environments override theeffect of genetic heredity on intelligence, but

good environments do not—fitting the view thatbad environments are stronger.

Thus, we do not have extensive data compar-ing good versus bad influences on child devel-opment, but the available data are methodolog-ically quite strong because of the research de-sign that separates environmental from geneticeffects. The evidence is consistent with the viewthat bad is stronger than good.

Social Support

Over the past couple decades, the importanceof social support has been established as centralto health and well-being. Social support is usu-ally defined in terms of emotional bolsteringand practical assistance received from otherpeople, particularly friends, relatives, and otherrelationship partners. Interactions with such in-dividuals are not invariably positive, however,and certainly conflict, undermining, and otherdetrimental interactions are possible. If bad isstronger than good, we would predict that theseaversive interactions with relationship partnerswill have a stronger impact on health, well-being, and other outcomes than will positive,supportive interactions. Given the general thrustof social support research toward showing pos-itive, beneficial effects, the social support liter-ature may be regarded on an a priori basis as afairly hostile sphere in which to test the hypoth-esis about the greater power of bad things.

Various findings have indicated that negativeor upsetting social support weighs more heavilythan positive or helpful social support (e.g.,Manne, Taylor, Dougherty, & Kemeny, 1997).One important approach has people furnish sep-arate ratings of the good and bad behaviors ofthe members of their social network (e.g., beinga source of conflict and distress vs. being help-ful and optimistic). Fiore, Becker, and Coppel(1983) used this method and found that thedegree to which a person rated his or her net-work members as upsetting was more predictiveof depression than was the rated degree ofhelpfulness.

Similarly, Rook (1984) found that helpfulaspects of the social networks of older widowedwomen were generally unrelated to psycholog-ical adjustment and well-being, but problem-atic, unhelpful aspects of the widows' networkswere associated with lower levels of adjustmentand well-being, even after controlling for sev-


eral demographic and health-related variables.More precisely, the number of interpersonalproblems and the number of people who pro-vided problematic or confiictual interactionsboth predicted (lower) well-being, whereas thenumber of sources of positive social supportfailed to predict anything (except loneliness,which seems a trivially obvious effect). Rookconcluded that aversive social interactions havestronger effects on well-being than positive so-cial interactions.

Using an older sample of both genders, Okun,Melichar, and Hill (1990) found stronger (cor-relational) effects for bad than good social tiesand for bad than good daily events. The badaspects of the social network predicted psycho-logical distress more strongly than the goodaspects. The independent contributions of goodand bad aspects of one's social support networkon people caring for a spouse with Alzheimer'sdisease were assessed by Pagel, Erdly, andBecker (1987) in a 10-month longitudinal study.They found that positive aspects (such as help-fulness) were unrelated to depression and socialsupport satisfaction. Negative aspects such as up-setting interactions, however, predicted greaterdepression and lower satisfaction with the socialnetwork. Even after controlling for initial de-pression and initial problems, changes in nega-tive aspects of social support over time pre-dicted changes in depression.

Similar findings were reported by Finch,Okun, Barrera, Zautra, and Reich (1989). Theirsample consisted of recently disabled or re-cently bereaved older adults and a matched con-trol group. Positive social ties predicted positivewell-being, whereas negative social ties pre-dicted both well-being and distress.

The effects of social conflict and social sup-port on coping with abortion were studied byMajor et al. (1997). They concluded that con-flict in close relationships had a greater impactthan support on postabortion distress, althoughsupport in close relationships had a greater im-pact on postabortion well-being. These resultsfit an affect-matching view (i.e., good thingshave an impact on good feelings, whereas badthings have an impact on bad feelings) ratherthan the simpler blanket position that bad isstronger than good, so their results could beconsidered partly contrary to the main thrusthere. Several features of their study prevent itfrom serving as powerful contrary evidence,

though. For one, most of the disclosures wereselectively aimed only at people who thewomen expected would be supportive: Womendid not disclose the abortion to someone whowas likely to be disapproving, so the range wasseverely restricted. Furthermore, the effectswere obtained mainly after controlling for pos-itive and negative affectivity, and these vari-ables strongly colored the perception of socialsupport and conflict. As noted previously, interms of pure effects not already adjusted byvalence, negative affectivity had a stronger im-pact overall than the positive, on both types ofoutcomes combined.

Social support and social conflict (undermin-ing) were examined by Vinokur and van Ryn(1993) in a sample of people who had lost theirjobs within the past 4 months, with follow-upquestionnaires 2 months and 4 months later.Independent measures were given for socialsupport and social conflict or undermining, andthese had been designed to look at behaviorsthat would, in principle, have precisely oppositeeffects (i.e., restoring vs. diminishing self-worth). Despite the implicit parallel, the mea-sures of social conflict and social support werenot opposite ends of a single factor. They werenegatively correlated at about -.70, but werefound to be largely independent factors withquite different effects on other variables.

Most relevant were the effects on mentalhealth, which was assessed by measures of anx-iety and depression scales from a symptom in-dex. Social conflict or undermining was signif-icantly related to mental health at all threetimes, with correlations growing from .20 atTime 1 to .47 on the final survey 4 months later.In contrast, positive social support had a weak(r = -.20) relation to mental health at Time 1and even weaker, nonsignificant relationships atlater times. Thus, positive social interactions inthe form of social support had only a weakeffect on mental health, and only at first,whereas social conflict continued to have astrong (and, if anything, an increasing) effect onmental health throughout the period of study.Vinokur and van Ryn (1993) concluded that badinteractions are more influential than good ones:"Interpersonal conflicts that are expressed inundermining behaviors appear to have a stron-ger concurrent impact on mental health thansupportive behaviors" (p. 358).

340 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, F1NKENAUER, AND VOHS

The separate effects of support and hindrancefrom one's social network were studied byRuehlman and Wolchik (1988) in a large sam-ple of undergraduates. They asked participantsto choose the three adults who were most im-portant to them in their current life situation andto report the degree to which these individualssupported and hindered the four most importantpersonal projects and goals in the participant'scurrent life. The researchers found that supportand hindrance were largely independent, andindeed the correlations between support andhindrance by the same person ranged from .00to .11. They found that project hindrance pre-dicted both well-being (i.e., positive psycholog-ical functioning) and distress (negative psycho-logical functioning). Project support, on theother hand, predicted only well-being. Althoughtheir findings represent only cross-sectional cor-relations, and causal interpretation is thereforenecessarily speculative, these findings do pointtoward the same conclusion that bad eventshave more pervasive effects than good events.These results also fit the broader pattern inwhich bad events affect both good and badoutcomes, whereas good events only affectgood outcomes.

The role of social support versus social con-flict or undermining was studied in relation toseveral different sources of support by Abbey,Abramis, and Caplan (1985). With regard to theperson closest to the respondent, bad wasclearly stronger than good: Social conflict wasrelated to three of the four measures of well-being, whereas social support did not correlatesignificantly with any of them. Likewise, whenparticipants reported on support and conflictfrom "some one person," conflict predicted withmore (four) indices of well-being, whereas sup-port predicted only one. For the vaguest cate-gory, however, social support versus conflictwith people in general, both support and conflictpredicted well-being on almost all of the mea-sures. These results suggest that bad is strongerthan good when considering particular and im-portant individuals, but across the broadly non-specific social network, bad and good socialrelations were about equally important.

Supportive and negative interactions withspouses, friends, and relatives were also exam-ined by Schuster, Kessler, and Aseltine (1990).Both types of interactions had effects on emo-tional functioning (measured in terms of a

checklist for depressive symptoms). Compari-son of the trends however suggested that thenegative interactions had a stronger effect.

Taken together, thus these studies suggestthat helpful aspects of one's social network bearlittle or no relation to depression, well-being,and social support satisfaction, while upsettingor unhelpful aspects do. Some findings fit anaffect-matching view, in which positive interac-tions predict positive outcomes whereas nega-tive interactions predict negative ones. Even inthose findings, however, there appears to be anasymmetry: Bad interactions have stronger,more pervasive, and longer lasting effects.

Information Processing

The extent of information processing is animportant indicator of power and importance.High motivation and pragmatic concerns causepeople to process relevant information morethoroughly (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Insofaras people are cognitive misers, they cannot af-ford to process all information to an equally fullextent, so they must prioritize their cognitiveresources and focus on what is important. If badis generally stronger than good, then informa-tion pertaining to bad events should receivemore thorough processing than informationabout good events. The greater information pro-cessing may be reflected in paying more atten-tion to them and in elaborating them more thor-oughly or constructing more extensive cogni-tive interpretations (such as attributions). Themore extensive processing will also tend to leadto enhanced memory for bad material, althoughthis tendency may sometimes be offset if themain goal and thrust of the processing involvedefensive responses that retroactively minimizethe bad events and thus conspire to erase themfrom memory (cf. Taylor, 1991).

Early evidence that bad things get morethought was provided by Klinger, Barta, andMaxeiner (1980). On a self-report scale, peopleclaimed to devote more thought to their goalsthat were blocked than to other categories (in-cluding positive things). Threatened personalrelationships and projects that had encounteredunexpected difficulties topped the list of mostfrequent topics of thought.

The quantity of cognition in response to var-ious interpersonal events was studied by Abele(1985). People engaged in more thinking and


reasoning about bad than good events. A furtherand noteworthy feature of Abele's research isthat she also explicitly manipulated whether theevent was expected or unexpected. This vari-able yielded its own main effect (unexpectedevents produced more cognitions), but it did notinteract with valence. Thus, bad events elicitmore processing than good events, even whenthe expectedness of the event is held constant.This suggests that the greater power of badcannot be reduced to expectancy effects, con-trary to one of the theories we have proposed.

Quantity (duration) of cognitive processingwas measured by Fiske (1980), who showedpeople photographs of various behaviors thatvaried in positivity versus negativity. The os-tensible purpose of the photographs was to formimpressions. Participants spent longer viewingthe photographs depicting negative than posi-tive behaviors, suggesting that people paid moreattention to bad than good acts when formingimpressions.

More generally, it is generally assumed thatpeople seek to understand events that happen tothem, and attributional processing is part of thissearch for meaning (e.g., Baumeister, 1991;Frankl, 1963; Taylor, 1983). To find meaning,people can try to find a cause that provides themwith an answer to the question as to why certainevents happened or they can try to find a dif-ferent interpretation and reframe their experi-ences. Some evidence suggests that negativeevents cause people to engage in greater searchfor meaning and making sense than positiveevents. Baumeister concluded from a broad re-view that unpleasant events stimulate the needfor meaning to a greater degree than positive orpleasant events. An empirical test of the differ-ence was conducted by Gilovich (1983), whoexamined spontaneous thinking about importantoutcomes. Participants in his study first placedbets on sporting events and either lost or wonmoney. About 1 week after the event took place,they came back into the laboratory to settle theirbets with the experimenter. They also providedtape-recorded accounts of their current thoughtsabout the games. The amount of time spentdiscussing the game was greater for the lostgames than for the winning games. This differ-ence reflects a greater search for meaning forbad than for good outcomes.

A similar conclusion emerged from a reviewof 17 studies on causal attribution by Weiner

(1985). Spontaneous attributional activity wasdefined as people's efforts to explain what ishappening to them and to identify a cause forwhat happened. In all studies in which positiveevents were contrasted with negative ones,spontaneous attributional activity was greaterfor negative (e.g., failures) than for positiveevents (e.g., successes).

Pratto and John (1991) set out to test whetherattentional resources are automatically directedaway from the current task when extraneousstimuli, either good or bad, are presented. Usinga modified Stroop paradigm, the researcherspresented participants with personality trait ad-jectives (e.g., sadistic, honest), and participantswere instructed to name the color ink in whicheach word was printed. To the extent that atten-tion was automatically seized by the meaning ofthe trait, participants would be slower to namethe color. In the first study, people took longerto name the ink color when the word referred toa bad trait than when it was a good trait. Thus,the meanings of bad traits had greater power forattracting attention, as compared with goodtraits. Retrospective self-reports indicated thatparticipants claimed they ignored the words andconcentrated on the colors, which is consistentwith the view that any interference occurred atan automatic and not a fully conscious level.

In a second study, Pratto and John (1991)replicated the greater interference by bad thangood traits and also showed that people hadgreater memory for the bad than for the goodtraits: Participants were twice as likely to re-member the bad ones than the good ones. Thissuggests that the automatic shifting of attentionto the bad traits stimulated some incidentallearning, resulting in the superior recall. In athird study, Pratto and John replicated the ef-fects despite explicitly varying the base rates ofgood and bad traits, in order to rule out thehypothesis that bad information is stronger sim-ply because it is more unusual. The manipula-tion of base rates (i.e., whether the stimulus setcontained more good or more bad traits in total)was not significant, whereas the valence imbal-ance remained significant across different baserates. The authors concluded that bad informa-tion, at least in the form of undesirable traitterms, has more power than good informationfor attracting attention in an automatic, nonin-tentional fashion, and that this effect is not dueto greater informativeness of diagnosticity


(based on generally positive expectations andbase rates).

The greater attention to bad than good wasshown in a different way by Graziano, Brothen,and Berscheid (1980). Participants received ei-ther a positive or a negative evaluation fromanother person. They viewed the other person'sevaluation on videotape. Across conditions, allparticipants monitored the negative evaluationvideo for significantly more time (56% of thetotal time) than the positive evaluation video(44% of the total time). This difference wasmore pronounced when participants expected tointeract with the other person as compared withwhen participants did not expect any futureinteraction.

Attention to emotionally expressive faceswas studied by Oehman, Lundqvist, and Es-teves (2001). Schematically drawn faces werepresented in groups, and some of them hadeither a happy smiling face or a threatening,frowning face. Threatening faces were detectedmore quickly and accurately than the smilingfaces under most conditions. A no-differenceresult was obtained under one condition (in-volving a background matrix of friendly facesand a short processing time), but overall thefrowning faces were noticed better.

Another sign of the attentional priority of badover good was furnished by Marshall and Kidd(1981), who conducted a series of studies ask-ing whether participants preferred to hear goodor bad news first, provided that both were forth-coming. Across several studies, they found astrong majority consistently (from 77% to 88%)asked to hear the bad news first. The greaterprocessing of bad than good events was shownby Holtzworth-Munroe and Jacobson (1985) inthe context of marital relationships. Participantsgenerated lists of positive and negative events,frequent and infrequent, that were occurring intheir marriage. They were then presented withvarious items from the list in random order andasked to list their thoughts and feelings thatwould occur if each event were happening rightnow. The aversive partner behaviors, regardlessof whether frequent or infrequent, led to moreattributional activity than positive partnerbehaviors.

The issue is somewhat more complicated inreactions to other people's emotion displays.Krull and Dill (1998) found that participantsmade more spontaneous trait inferences from

other participant's happy rather than sad behav-ior. They speculated, however, that sad behav-ior can result from a variety of causes, so it iscomplex and not sufficiently unambiguous (di-agnostic) to permit a spontaneous inference. Insupport of this conclusion, Krull and Dill re-ported that participants were significantlyslower at making either inferences about thecauses of sad behavior as compared with happybehavior. The slower reaction time is consistentwith the general theme of greater processingwith regard to negative than positive informa-tion. In plain terms, people can make snap judg-ments about someone who seems happy, butthey engage in longer and more complex (butless conclusive) thinking about someone whoseems sad.

The longer time taken for the attributionsabout negative behaviors may be related to thegreater specificity of negative traits. Claeys andTimmers (1993) found that bad traits are morespecifically and narrowly defined than goodtraits, in the sense that the bad traits are seen asmore different from each other and encompass anarrower range of behaviors. The greater spec-ificity of bad traits may be a linguistic sign ofthe greater power or importance of bad thangood, parallel to the preponderance of words forbad than good emotions.

There is also some evidence that affectiveconsequences of negative information are stron-ger than those of good information. Ikegami(1993) primed people by having them writefirst-person sentences containing friendly, hos-tile, or neutral words. The hostile priming hadstronger and longer lasting effects on subse-quent emotional states than either the positive orthe neutral primes.

Some apparent exceptions may be found inthe special category of bad feedback about theself, which people are motivated to avoid.Baumeister and Cairns (1992) found that repres-sors devoted less processing time to unfavor-able personality feedback, under some condi-tions. The tendency to avoid bad feedback prob-ably does not indicate any lack of strength onthe part of the individual, however. More likely,it reflects a tendency to want to shield the selffrom the negative impact (such as potential lossof self-esteem). Even in this work, moreover,bad information did receive exceptionally longprocessing when it could not easily be dis-missed and avoided, so even the apparent ex-


ception to the general pattern was found underonly limited conditions.

The more extensive and elaborate processingof bad than good material has been amply con-firmed in practical contexts outside of the lab-oratory, too. Among journalists and communi-cation scientists, it is considered commonknowledge that bad events are more newswor-thy and attract more reader attention. Periodiccalls for the news to focus more on positive,uplifting stories get nowhere, not because jour-nalists are sadists or misanthropes, but becausebad news sells more papers. Likewise, Fiedler's(1966/1982) authoritative history of novels in-cluded the pointed observation that no one hasever been able to make a successful novel abouta happy marriage, whereas marital problemshave filled countless novels. Thus, the mostwidely read classes of writers—journalists andnovelists—both devote the bulk of their writingto elaborating bad rather than good events.Thus, bad information does receive more thor-ough information processing than good infor-mation. Bad information is more likely to seizeattention, and it receives more conscious pro-cessing as well. The one exception to this gen-eral rule involves unflattering information aboutthe self that some individuals such as repressorsmay simply avoid.

Memory

Memory should be most subject to a positiv-ity bias, in view of the minimization processesthat selectively erase bad memories (Taylor,1991) and other repressive processes. Yet evenwith memory, there is some evidence that bad isstronger than good, although this effect isbounded by self-enhancement processes andmood-congruent recall processes.

Interviews with children and adults up to 50years old (in separate studies) about childhoodmemories found a preponderance of unpleasantmemories, even among people who rated theirchildhoods as having been relatively pleasantand happy (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1968).

Likewise, superior recall for unfavorable in-formation was shown by Dreben, Fiske, andHastie (1979). Regardless of serial position,sentences describing people's undesirable be-haviors were recalled better than sentences de-scribing desirable or neutral behaviors. The su-perior memory for bad than for good things was

also found by Bless et al. (1992). Participantsremembered bad behaviors better than goodones. Skowronski and Carlston (1987) alsofound that bad behaviors were recalled betterthan good ones, for both extreme and moderatelevels.

On the other hand, biases that flatter the selfmake recall of one's own bad behaviors lesslikely. Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, and Shan-non (1991) explicitly compared memory foreveryday life events for both the self and foranother person such as a friend whom the par-ticipant saw almost every day. They found nodifference in recall for the friend's pleasantversus unpleasant events, but for the self therewas a memory bias in favor of the pleasantevents (although this was limited to events withintermediate typicality; typical and atypicalevents were recalled better, regardless of pleas-antness). These findings suggest that there arecertain memory biases that downplay bad expe-riences of the self but not of other people,consistent with Taylor's (1991) minimizationhypothesis.

Also supportive of a motivation to minimizenegative events are the findings from a study inwhich the researchers examined whether recol-lection of the emotional intensity of a personalevent changed as a function on time and initialpositivity or negativity of the event (Walker,Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). Walker et al. as-sessed participants' evaluations of personal ex-periences—both positive and negative—as theyoccurred and then reassessed their evaluationsof these experiences at intervals of 3 months, 1year, and 4.5 years. Consistent with previousfindings (e.g., Holmes, 1970), they found thatthe affective intensity of a memory fades astime progressed and that this effect was espe-cially true for memories of negative events.That is, the drop in intensity was steeper formemories of negative, compared with positive,events. Notably, the content of the memoriesremained intact over time. The researchers in-terpreted this finding as indicating that peopleeffortfully target the emotional intensity of neg-ative events, hoping to diminish their subse-quent influence (see Taylor, 1991).

Cognitive psychologists have examinedwhether bad items are processed and remem-bered better than positive ones. Robinson-Riegler and Winton (1996) confirmed that par-ticipants showed better recognition memory for


negative than positive items. Furthermore, theywere better able to recall the source of bad thangood information, as shown by their ability toidentify which stimuli had come to them in asecond as opposed to a first phase; whereas thepositive stimuli seemed simply to get all mixedtogether. These findings suggest that the badmaterial received more thorough processingwhen it was encoded and was, therefore, re-tained in a more complex, elaborate memorytrace.

Ohira, Winton, and Oyama (1997) extendedRobinson-Riegler and Winton's work by in-cluding measures of eyeblinks and latency, bothof which have been associated with increasedconscious processing. They too found that par-ticipants remembered (recognized) negativewords more successfully than positive words.The negative words were also associated withslower responses and more eyeblinks, both ofwhich indicate greater conscious processing.These findings fit the view that negative mate-rial evokes more extensive conscious activity,which in turn produces better memory for thematerial.

In contrast, there is evidence for mood-con-gruent recall for semantic material (for a re-view, see Matt, Vasquez, & Campbell, 1992).Nondepressed individuals show a bias towardrecalling positively valenced stimulus words;depressed individuals recall equal numbers ofpositively valenced and negatively valencedstimulus words.

In summary, three psychological forces ap-pear to collide in the human memory. The mem-ory literature does supply limited evidence forthe greater power of bad over good, but thisdoes not appear to be the dominant force. Thisevidence coexists with a tendency for individu-als to recall positive information (a self-en-hancement effect), particularly when in a posi-tive mood (a mood-congruent recall effect).This is true for self-relevant memories and se-mantic recall.

Stereotypes

A generalization about a category or group ofpeople can in principle be either good or bad.Although undoubtedly some stereotypes are fa-vorable, the majority of them appear to be neg-ative and pejorative. This suggests that the pro-cess of forming and maintaining stereotypes is

biased toward negativity, which would be yetanother sign that bad is stronger than good.

One important source of stereotype formationand persistence is illusory correlation based ondistinctive events. A meta-analytic review of 23studies on this pattern was conducted by Mullenand Johnson (1990). They found that distinctivenegative behaviors have stronger effects, in thesense of being better able to generate illusorycorrelations, than distinctive positive behaviorsor neutral behaviors. In particular, minoritygroups (which are already salient by virtue ofminority status) are likely to be assigned unde-sirable stereotypes based on illusory correlations.

One important sign of differential powerwould be the relative ease with which stereo-types are formed and disconfirmed, as a func-tion of whether the stereotype is favorable orunfavorable. Rothbart and Park (1986) foundstrong correlations between the favorability of atrait and the number of instances required for itsconfirmation (r = .71) and discontinuation (r =-.70). Specifically, the more unfavorable thetrait, the fewer the number of instances requiredfor confirmation and the greater the number ofinstances necessary for disconfirmation.

In other words, bad reputations are easy toacquire but difficult to lose, whereas good rep-utations are difficult to acquire but easy to lose.These findings suggest that unfavorable charac-teristics once acquired as part of a stereotypemay be difficult to lose in part because a largenumber of observations are necessary for theirdisconfirmation. The findings certainly confirmthat bad is stronger than good: It takes far moreto overcome the bad than the good trait, andmore to change the bad than the goodreputation.

Forming Impressions

Impression formation is one of the few topicswith which researchers have recognized anddiscussed a general pattern of valence imbal-ance (e.g., Kanouse & Hanson, 1972). Theusual term is positive—negative asymmetry, in-dicating that bad information about a stimulusperson or new acquaintance carries more weightand has a larger impact on impressions thangood information (e.g., Peeters & Czapinski,1990).

An early demonstration of this asymmetrywas provided by Anderson (1965), who pre-


sumably hoped for different findings because hewas trying to advance an additive and averagingmodel of impression formation. That is, hesought to show that people form impressions ofsomeone by adding up and averaging all of theinformation they have about that person, goodand bad alike.

To support his averaging model, Anderson(1965) provided participants with various per-sonality traits that allegedly characterized astimulus person. These traits had been givenprecise weights based on favorability ratings, sohe carefully chose positive and negative traitsthat were equally distant from the neutral pointon the favorability scale. The participants werethen asked to rate their overall impression of thestimulus person. Anderson could then investi-gate how these global impressions departedfrom the midpoint of the scale as a function ofhow the various traits departed from the favor-ability midpoint. He found that the bad traitadjectives were stronger than the good ones.The mean ratings of stimulus persons defined byall negative traits departed farther from theglobal scale midpoint than did the mean ratingsof stimulus persons defined by all positive traits,even though the traits were equally distant fromthe midpoint. Furthermore, when stimulus per-sons were described with both favorable andunfavorable traits, the unfavorable ones loweredthe global impression rating more than a simpleadditive or averaging model would predict, un-like the favorable traits, which did not exert aninfluence beyond averaging. Anderson con-cluded that unfavorable trait adjectives weremore powerful than favorable ones in shapingimpressions.

Another early demonstration was providedby Feldman (1966; see also discussion inWright, 1991), who was also interested in av-eraging models. Participants in his study pro-vided ratings of stimulus persons who had beendescribed with one positive, one negative, orone of each type of adjective. The overall rat-ings of people described by both positive andnegative labels were more negative than a sim-ple averaging of impressions would have pre-dicted: Thus, the bad information carried moreweight. Wyer and Hinkle (1971) likewise foundthat bad information carried more weight inimpression formation than in good information.

Similar findings were provided by Hodges(1974). Participants in his study rated pairs of

traits, and Hodges then calculated whether thecombined impression deviated from the averageof the two traits. A pure averaging model suc-cessfully predicted impressions when only bothtraits were positive. In all others, the more neg-ative trait carried greater weight. Thus, evenwhen both traits were negative, the total impres-sion was more negative than a simple averagingof the two traits would predict. Of course, whenthe traits were one of each, the bad one carriedmore weight. Thus, bad information consis-tently had a stronger effect on the finalimpression.

Hamilton and Huffman (1971) also foundthat undesirable traits received more weight inimpression formation than did desirable ones.The authors explained this on the basis of dis-tinctive usefulness of information: Becausegood behavior is common and expected, badthings are more revealing and hence more im-portant to know. Hamilton and Zanna (1972)found that negative traits exerted a strongereffect than positive traits on impressions, asshown by greater departure from the mean rat-ings of neutral targets. Moreover, negative traitshad a stronger effect than positive traits onparticipants' confidence in their impressions.That is, raters were more confident of the accu-racy of their bad impression of someone withbad traits than they were confident about theirgood impression of someone with good traits.Taken together, these findings show that badinformation has greater power both objectivelyand subjectively. The objective power is shownin the stronger effect on the impression, and thesubjective power is shown in the greater confi-dence in the accuracy of the impression.

Evidence that negative information carriesmore weight than positive information in termsof influence on likeability was provided byFiske (1980). She showed photographs depict-ing various behaviors that differed in valence(i.e., positive or negative) and extremity. Neg-ative behaviors had more impact on likeabilitythan positive information, especially when thelevel of extremity was high. The greater powerof bad information than good information hascontinued to be found in recent work (e.g.,Vonk, 1993, 1996, 1999; Vonk & Knippenberg,1994).

The greater power of bad than good informa-tion can also be seen in speed of decision mak-ing and the amount of information sought. Yzer-


byt and Ley ens (1991) had participants makedecisions about whether a given actor wassuited to play a theatre role that was describedas likeable or unlikable. Participants were toldhow much total information was available abouteach actor and were given this information alittle at a time, so they were free to make adecision as soon as they felt confident enough todo so. The greater impact of negative trait in-formation was shown in speedier decisions (i.e.,with less information): A little evidence that theactor was unlikable was enough to discredit himor her for the likeable role. In contrast, a smallamount of evidence that an actor was likeablewas not enough to disqualify him or her for theunlikable role. (That is, with the unlikable role,the difference was eliminated but not signifi-cantly reversed.) When initial information wasfavorable but unfavorable information followedit (with the likeable role), participants shiftedstrongly and quickly to rejecting the candidate,which again shows a disproportionately strongimpact of bad traits. In general, then, peoplemade faster decisions with less informationwhen they were given negative rather than pos-itive information.

The evidence and theories about the positive-negative asymmetry were reviewed by Skow-ronski and Carlston (1989). These authors alsoput forward their own theory, based on categorydiagnosticity (see also Czapinski, 1986). Thebasic assumptions of their theory were, first,that people categorize other individuals by us-ing available informational cues. Second, peo-ple see some behaviors as more helpful thanothers in discriminating between various traitcategorizations. In other words, some behaviorsare more informative than others. For example,the behavior of stealing is more informativeabout someone's honesty than is the behavior ofrunning. This usefulness of behaviors for mak-ing such judgments is what Skowronski andCarlston meant by category diagnosticity.Third, attributes perceived as more diagnosticfor category membership will be more influen-tial in impression formation than others. Fourth,and most relevant, extreme or negative behav-iors are perceived as more diagnostic than mod-erate or positive behaviors.

Why should this be so? Skowronski and Carl-ston (1989) proposed that bad behaviors aremore diagnostic than good ones simply becausethe category requirements of consistency are

more stringent for good than bad traits. To becategorized as good, one has to be good all ofthe time (consistently). To be categorized asbad, a few bad acts are sufficient, and presum-ably hardly anyone is consistently bad. Hence,negative behaviors carry more weight than pos-itive behaviors for ruling out some categories.

The diagnosticity view was tested in a laterpaper by Skowronski and Carlston (1992). Theynoted that to be morally good means to bealways good, whereas immorality does not re-quire consistent immorality, so single immoralbehaviors are more diagnostic. For example,one may be regarded as a liar despite telling thetruth on many occasions, but one will not beregarded as an honest man if he tells many lies.The opposite may apply to intelligence, how-ever, because a stupid person can never bebrilliant, whereas a very intelligent person canoccasionally do a stupid thing. Skowronski andCarlston did find that the negativity bias heldtrue for moral behaviors but was reversed forintelligence-related behaviors: Extremely posi-tive (intelligent) acts had a bigger effect thanextremely negative ones.

The greater power of bad in the sphere ofmoral behavior was the focus of Riskey andBirnbaum (1974) in an article with the revealingsubtitle, "Two Rights Don't Make Up for aWrong." They found that morally bad actionscreate a powerful effect on overall judgment,and this effect is only slightly mitigated byadding morally good actions. Riskey and Birn-baum's conclusion was "the overall goodness ofa person is determined mostly by his worst baddeed, with good deeds having lesser influ-ence. . . . Given a person has done evil, aninfinite number of good deeds may not producea favorable overall impression" (p. 172). Skow-ronski and Carlston (1992) found that the im-pression impact of morally good behaviors waseasily overridden by new information depictingimmoral behaviors, but the reverse did not hold:An initial impression based on morally bad be-haviors was not easily changed by new infor-mation about morally good behaviors.

Some researchers have pointed out that incertain domains, positive information shouldcarry more weight. Skowronski and Carlston(1987) contended that diagnosticity helps pre-dict differential weighting of information as afunction of whether the judgment pertains tomorality or competence. With morality, bad


acts are more diagnostic because only immoralpeople do bad things, whereas both moral andimmoral people do good things. With ability,however, good performances should be morediagnostic than bad ones because only compe-tent people achieve superior performances,whereas both competent and incompetent peo-ple can perform badly. Their findings confirmeda negativity bias with moral traits (e.g., dishon-est behaviors influenced impressions more thanhonest ones) but a positivity bias with traitsbased on competence (e.g., intelligent behaviorshad a stronger effect than stupid ones). Thedependent variable in these studies was the par-ticipant's estimate that the stimulus personwould act a certain way in the future, whichdiffers from simply giving a subjective judg-ment of favorability or likeability. Thus, theresults indicate mainly that having performedwell (i.e., competently) leads to stronger predic-tions about future performance than having per-formed badly, whereas having acted immorallyleads to stronger predictions about future per-formance than having acted morally.

Similar results were reported by Martijn,Spears, van der Pligt, and Jakobs (1992), butwith an added twist that they surveyed the neteffect of various combinations on overall im-pressions. The global impression was more af-fected by bad behaviors than good ones, regard-less of whether the information referred to abil-ity or morality. That is, Martijn et al. examinedvarious combinations of traits (e.g., morally in-corruptible plus clever, incorruptible plus stu-pid, corrupt plus clever, and corrupt plus stupid)and assessed overall impressions. All of thecombinations, except the double-positive condi-tion, were more negative than a simple averag-ing model would have predicted. Thus, any badinformation carried a disproportionately stron-ger impact than any good information. Anotherway of describing their results is that they rep-licated the diagnosticity effect but also showedthat the greater power of bad than good infor-mation goes beyond issues of diagnosticity.

Hiring and personnel decisions constitute anespecially important sphere of impression for-mation, and it is one in which situational con-tingencies probably underscore the greater im-portance of bad information: It may be morecostly to hire a bad, undesirable employee thanto reject a good, desirable one. Bolster andSpringbett (1961) studied how interviewers'

opinions changed as a function of new good orbad information about a candidate. Across avariety of measures and procedures, they foundconsistently that bad information exerted amore powerful effect than good information.For example, if the initial judgment favoredhiring (i.e., acceptance), only 3.8 unfavorablebits of information were required to shift thedecision to rejection; whereas 8.8 favorablepieces of information were necessary to shift aninitially negative decision toward acceptance.Likewise, Webster (1964) concluded that per-sonnel interviewers use unfavorable informa-tion as a basis for rejecting candidates to agreater extent than they use favorable informa-tion as a basis for hiring them. Webster sug-gested that it was more common (and hencepresumably required less information) tochange from a favorable to an unfavorable im-pression of a candidate than to change fromunfavorable to favorable.

The influence of speaking with positive ver-sus negative words on impressions was studiedby Berry, Pennebaker, Mueller, and Hiller(1997). They instructed one set of participantsto "tell us about yourself and what is going onin your life," and they videotaped thesespeeches. The tapes were then shown to otherparticipants, who rated each one on several di-mensions. Berry et al. found that people used farmore positive than negative emotion words intheir self-disclosures (consistent with the viewthat positive things outnumber bad things), butthe negative emotion words had significantlymore impact on impressions. Specifically, themore people used negative emotion words, theless warm/likable and the less competent theywere judged to be. Positive emotion words hadno significant impact on either type of ratingand, in fact, on ratings of dominance, positiveemotion words actually had a negative effect.Berry et al. speculated that the reason for thediscrepancy is that it is acceptable and evenexpected for people to discuss positive feelingsduring a first encounter, but speaking aboutnegative feelings is not expected and generatesa stronger reaction.

Thus, the greater power of bad than goodinformation in forming impressions has beenwell documented and recognized by research-ers. Multiple theories have been put forward toaddress this asymmetry, including expectations,memory, and category diagnosticity. Although


these theories can each explain a substantialamount of the findings, the greater power of badthan good information appears to survive evenwhen these explanations do not apply.

Self

Self-concepts should seemingly be onesphere in which bad is not stronger than good. Itis well recognized that most people hold ratherfavorable opinions of themselves. Taylor andBrown (1988) documented a substantial amountof evidence indicating that people think morefavorably of themselves than objective evidencewarrants (see also Greenwald, 1980). Baumeis-ter, Tice, and Hutton (1989) showed that self-esteem scores on all different scales tend to bedistributed from very high to medium, withhardly any participants scoring in the truly lowself-esteem range. Other reviews have con-firmed that implausibly high majorities of peo-ple consider themselves to be above average onvarious dimensions (see Gilovich, 1991). If badperformances carried greater weight in formingself-concepts, then presumably most peoplewould regard themselves as below averagerather than above.

Yet perhaps a direct prediction that peoplewould have unfavorable self-concepts is unre-alistic. It is generally agreed that people havestrong motivations to maintain favorable con-cepts of themselves (e.g., Banaji & Prentice,1994; Baumeister, 1998; Sedikides, 1993).Hence, it is likely that they exert themselves toprevent bad information and bad experiencesfrom producing an unfavorable self-concept.Thus, bad information could actually havegreater power than good, without necessarilyresulting in a bad self-concept—provided thatpeople's responses to bad experiences or threat-ening information are capable of discountingany implications about the self. This was acentral thrust of Taylor's (1991) paper, whichrecognized the power of bad feedback but pro-posed that minimization processes selectivelydiscredit and erase the negative implications forself.

These arguments suggest a way to reformu-late the question of whether bad is stronger thangood with respect to the self. The strong moti-vation to have a good rather than a bad opinionof self can be decomposed into two strivings:one of which is to avoid a bad opinion of self

(self-protection), and the other is to gain a goodopinion of self (self-enhancement). If bad isstronger than good, then the self-protective mo-tivation should be stronger than the self-en-hancement one.

Self-concept theory has traditionally placedmore emphasis on self-enhancement than onself-protection, such as embodied in the conceptof the ideal self (a positive view of self) that isseen as the main motivator. Ogilvie (1987) sur-veyed psychology students and faculty as towhether life satisfaction depended more on be-coming like their ideal selves or becoming un-like their undesired selves, and nearly 90% ofboth students and faculty said the desire to meetone's positive ideals was stronger. Yet Ogil-vie's own data pointed strongly in the oppositedirection: The undesired self (operationally de-fined as "How I hope never to be") was a morepowerful motivator than the desired self. Gen-eral satisfaction in life had significant correla-tions with both closeness to the ideal self andcloseness to the undesired self, but the latterwas significantly higher (for ideal self, r = .368;for undesired self, r = -.719). Regression anal-yses suggested that the motivation to approachone's ideals might even be derivative of themotivation to avoid becoming one's undesiredself. Ogilvie suggested that many people formtheir ideals precisely in response to their unde-sired selves. For example, Ogilvie described 1participant who said his most undesired self wasto be dependent, needy, and selfish and whocorrespondingly erected ideals for himself to beunselfishly helpful to others. "It is likely that hisideal self was derived from his undesired selfand not vice versa, and it is suspected that thisis the normal course of events" (Ogilvie, 1987,p. 384).

The distinction between protection and en-hancement was also made by Baumeister et al.(1989) with regard to individual differences inself-esteem and self-presentational motivations.They concluded that people with low self-es-teem are primarily concerned with self-protec-tion, consistent with the view of the greaterpower of bad events. In contrast, however,Baumeister et al. concluded that people withhigh self-esteem are oriented toward self-en-hancement, which seemingly suggests the op-posite motivational pattern (of greater concernwith good than bad). Yet the self-enhancementorientation of people with high self-esteem does


not actually indicate an indifference to bad out-comes or failure. If anything, people with highself-esteem show even more dramatic and strik-ing responses to failure than people with lowself-esteem (e.g., Baumeister & Tice, 1985;Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993; McFar-lin & Blascovich, 1981). The difference appearsto be that people with high self-esteem do notworry much about failure or rejection becausethey do not expect these to happen. Their highlyfavorable expectations account for the surpris-ing discrepancy between seeming disregard ofpossible future failure and strong and distraughtreactions when they actually receive failurefeedback (Blaine & Crocker, 1993).

The distribution of self-esteem scores may berelevant. As Baumeister et al. (1989) noted,participants scoring above the median in self-esteem do actually have high self-esteem scoresin an absolute sense, so it is plausible that theydo not spend much time worrying about possi-ble bad outcomes. In contrast, participants scor-ing below the median (thus low in self-esteem)typically have scores that are medium in self-esteem, in absolute terms, indicating that theyhave roughly comparable familiarity with suc-cess and failure. Thus, when both success andfailure are familiar, bad is stronger than good,and only the people who rarely encounter fail-ure (according to their belief and perception,anyway) disdain self-protection.

A direct test of the relative power of the twomotivations was undertaken by Tice (1991).She used the motivated pattern of self-handi-capping, a strategic behavior that consists ofcreating obstacles to one's own performance,such as inadequate practice or alcohol impair-ment (Jones & Berglas, 1978). In principle,self-handicapping can both enhance success(e.g., succeeding despite minimal practice isdoubly impressive) and protect against failure(e.g., failing after inadequate practice is no dis-grace). Although Tice's findings confirmed thegeneral hypothesis that low self-esteem peoplewould self-handicap for self-protection whilehigh self-esteem people would do it for self-enhancement, the self-protection pattern wasstronger overall. For example, the self-protec-tive benefits of self-handicapping were en-dorsed by participants at both high and lowlevels of self-esteem, whereas the self-enhanc-ing benefits were endorsed only by participantswith high self-esteem. Put another way, every-

one recognizes the value of self-handicappingfor protecting against bad outcomes, whereasthe value for enhancing good outcomes is con-fined to people with high self-esteem (who donot worry much about failure anyway). Themore widespread appeal of self-protection isconsistent with the view that bad is strongerthan good.

Likewise, self-serving biases can operate ei-ther to protect against bad outcomes or to en-hance good ones, but, again, some evidencepoints to greater power and pervasiveness ofself-protection, suggesting that people are moremotivated to avoid the bad than to embrace thegood. Distortion of information in a self-servingbias was studied by Klein (1992), and he foundthat biases were stronger in connection with badthan good things. In an initial pair of studies,students were asked to estimate how often theyengaged in positive health-related behaviors(e.g., eating fruit, brushing teeth, and eatingvitamins) and negative health-related behaviors(e.g., sunbathing, driving in bad weather, andeating salty foods). They also estimated howoften their peers performed the same behaviors.There was ample evidence of self-serving bias:On average, students estimated that they per-formed the good acts more often, and the badacts less often, than their peers. For presentpurposes, the relevant point is that Klein foundgreater bias in connection with the bad than thegood behaviors. In fact, in the second study, thebias (i.e., the difference between self and peerestimates) reached significance for the bad be-haviors but not for the good ones. In a thirdstudy, Klein used the same behavior (eatingraisins) and presented it as either a healthful oran unhealthful behavior. When it was presentedas health enhancing, because of the high vita-min content of raisins, students claimed to eatmore raisins than their peers, but when it waspresented as unhealthful, because of a high sul-fur content of raisins, students estimated thatthey ate fewer raisins than their peers. (Controlparticipants, for whom eating raisins was notpresented as either healthful or unhealthful,showed no bias either way.) For present pur-poses, the most relevant finding was that thepositive bias was weaker than the negative bias.All these findings point to the conclusion thatavoiding the bad is a stronger motivation thanembracing the good.


More generally, people seem to show moreself-favoring biases for negative than for posi-tive behaviors. Hoorens (1996) reviewed multi-ple studies showing this pattern, which is to saythat people seek to avoid bad traits more thanthey seek to claim good traits. Hoorens's (1995)earlier work found a contrary pattern, in whichparticipants claimed to possess more good andfewer bad traits than the average person, so theeffect is not unanimous, but the contrary find-ings are often confounded. Thus, Hoorens's(1995) results were confounded by differentialbase rates: The rates of endorsement of badtraits were relatively low for both self and theaverage person, so there was relatively littlestatistical room for the denial of bad traits toemerge.

Personal optimism was also studied by Hoo-rens (1995) by having participants rate the rel-ative likelihood that various positive and nega-tive events would happen to them, as opposed tobeing likely to happen to the average person oftheir same age, sex, and school. The motiva-tional bias fit the view that bad is stronger thangood: Hoorens found that personal optimismwas more pronounced with regard to bad eventsthan good events. In other words, participantsunderestimated their own chances of havingvarious bad experiences (relative to the averageperson) more strongly than they overestimatedtheir chances of having various good experiences.

In performance settings, self-enhancementand self-protection are often indistinguishable.Doing one's best accomplishes both the goal ofavoiding failure and securing success. Only afew studies have effectively sought to separatethese motivations, but they too confirm that badis stronger than good. Goodhart (1986) had peo-ple engage in either positive or negative think-ing prior to an achievement task. These as-signed thinking strategies involved recallingoneself being in a situation in which one mighthave the assigned series of thoughts, such as"Deep down I think I'm a pretty competentperson" (positive) or "No matter how hard I try,I just can't seem to grasp certain things" (neg-ative). They were then given an anagrams task.The negative thinking led to better performanceon the test. Obviously, this does not reflect anydirect self-suggestion or self-fulfilling prophecy(because the results point in the opposite direc-tion). Goodhart concluded that the negativethoughts evoked more powerful motivationsthan the positive thoughts.

The distinction between self-enhancementand self-protection has been recast by Higgins(1987, 1996) as a distinction between preven-tion and promotion. In Higgins's view, the selfhas some goals that involve striving towardpositive ideals and others that involve prevent-ing the self from misdeeds, which he discussesin terms of "ought" goals. Direct comparison ofthese two was recently undertaken by Shah,Higgins, Friedman, and Kruglanski (1999).They found that the positive goals or idealswere more substitutable than the negative orought goals, which is another way of attesting tothe greater importance of the bad. That is, ifpeople refuse to accept a substitute for a partic-ular goal, it seems fair to assume that that goalis more important than another goal for whichthey will readily accept an alternative. In thestudy by Shah et al., participants performed twotasks, which were both framed as ideals, both asoughts, or one of each. When both were framedas ideals, then success on one reduced effort onthe second, whereas failure on the first led toincreased effort on the second—consistent withthe view that people believed success on onewould substitute for nonsuccess on the other. Incontrast, when both were framed as oughts (orwhen they were mixed), there was no evidenceof substitutability, in the sense that there was noeffect for feedback on the first task on effort onthe second.

A conceptual replication of this pattern wasdone by Liberman, Chen, and Higgins (1999;cited by Shah et al., 1999). In that study, par-ticipants were interrupted and prevented fromcompleting a first task and later given the op-portunity to do another task or to resume workon the same task. When both tasks were framedas ideals, they were willing to move to the newtask, consistent with a substitutability interpre-tation. In contrast, when both tasks were oughts,participants wanted only to resume the old task,presumably because the new task was not seenas a substitute. Thus, this line of work suggeststhat preventing one bad outcome is not an ade-quate substitute for preventing another bad out-come, whereas reaching one good outcome isoften an acceptable substitute for another.

The relative motivational power of good andbad traits can also be examined in indirect tac-tics. Indirect tactics of self-enhancement andprotection were studied by Cialdini and his col-leagues. The best known of these is probablythat of basking in reflected glory (Cialdini et al.,


1976), by which people link themselves to suc-cessful others and successful groups. Thesestudies, however, relied on the procedure ofascertaining how much students identified withtheir university (such as by wearing school col-ors) following victories versus defeats by thefootball team, so it is plausible that the effectswere mainly due to efforts to distance oneselffrom the unsuccessful team (rather than linkingoneself to the successful team).

A more rigorous follow-up study was there-fore done by Cialdini and Richardson (1980),who explicitly distinguished between "baskingand blasting" (p. 406). In that study, baskingreferred to enhancing the positivity of one'sown university, whereas blasting referred toderogating a rival university, and both tenden-cies were assessed as responses to personal crit-icism in the form of failure feedback on a cre-ativity test. Thus, basking invokes the good,whereas blasting invokes the bad. Across twostudies, Cialdini and Richardson found theblasting effect to be consistently stronger, and,in fact, the basking effect did not reach signif-icance in either study (unlike the blasting ef-fect). Thus, the tendency to depict one's rivaluniversity as bad was stronger than the tendencyto describe one's own university as good. Theimplication is that the motivation to avoid thebad is more powerful than the motivation toembrace the good, which is precisely what onewould expect if bad is stronger than good.

Thus, multiple lines of evidence suggest thatbad is stronger than good with regard to theself-concept, even though the simple fact ofpositively inflated self-appraisals might give theopposite impression. The positivity of self-con-cepts reflects the combined motivational effectsof self-protection (avoiding the bad) and self-enhancement (embracing the good). In manycases, such as a simple desire to do well, thesetwo motivations operate in tandem. When theycan effectively be separated, though, the weightof the evidence suggests that people are morestrongly motivated to avoid bad views of selfthan to claim good ones.

Feedback

The relative power of good versus bad feed-back is yet another sphere in which to testwhether bad is generally stronger than good.Some researchers have reviewed, as discussedin preceding sections, work that already points

to bad feedback as more potent. For example,some of the data on reacting to daily events areprobably mediated by feedback received duringevents, and the finding that bad days have morelasting impact than good days is probably a signthat bad feedback is stronger. Likewise, themore widespread use of self-handicapping forself-protection than self-enhancement (Tice,1991) suggests that people are more concernedabout avoiding bad feedback than about maxi-mizing good feedback, which points to a greatermotivational power of bad feedback.

Self-enhancement and self-protective strate-gies were studied by Agostinelli, Sherman,Preston, and Chassin (1992). Specifically, theseauthors examined whether people would re-spond to feedback by perceiving failure as rel-atively common and perceiving success as rel-atively uncommon. Both distortions benefit theself, regardless of whether the self succeeds orfails, because the self s success gains in prestigeby being seen as relatively special; whereas theself s failure loses its stigma if many otherpeople fail, too. Participants in their study re-ceived success, failure, or no feedback abouttheir performance on a decision-making prob-lem; they were then given measures of howother people would likely do. Biases in judg-ment were stronger following failure than suc-cess (as compared with the no-feedback con-trol): After failure, people rated failure as morecommon and likely but success as rarer in thegeneral population. Success, in contrast, yieldedno departures from the control group. Thus,participants were more affected by bad thangood outcomes, and their responses suggestedstronger motivations to protect the self againstfailure than to amplify or enhance the impact ofsuccess.

Students' reactions to feedback from teacherswere studied by Coleman, Jussim, and Abraham(1987). Bad feedback had a stronger effect onthe students' perceptions of their own perfor-mance than good feedback. Bad feedback wasalso seen as more indicative of the teachers' trueevaluations, although not surprisingly studentsregarded the good feedback as more accuratethan the bad.

Reactions to social feedback of acceptanceand rejection were studied by Leary, Tambor,Terdal, and Downs (1995). Participants weretold that they either had been selected by othermembers to be included in a group or excludedfrom it or had been randomly assigned to be


included or excluded. Only the intentional re-jection led to a change in self-esteem (and acorresponding change in ratings of other partic-ipants). Acceptance did not have an effect. Inanother study, Leary et al. provided participantswith specific individual feedback indicating thatanother person who had listened to their self-disclosures did or did not (a) like them, (b)accept them, or (c) desire to meet them. Therejection feedback resulted in self-esteem scoresthat were significantly lower than the individu-als' own pretest self-esteem, but no feedbackand the positive (acceptance) feedback failed toproduce any significant change in self-esteem.Thus, bad feedback was clearly stronger be-cause it alone had a significant effect.

The role of counterfactuals in responding toborderline feedback was explored by Medvecand Savitsky (1997). They compared partici-pants who had just barely made it into a desir-able grade category (e.g., getting the lowestpossible "A") against those who had just barelymissed it (e.g., getting the highest possible "B").Satisfaction was high among participants whohad just made the category and low amongthose who had just missed it, and the borderlinestatus enhanced these reactions. Thus, thosewho barely missed getting an A were moredistraught and engaged in more counterfactualsthan those who missed getting an A by a widemargin. For present purposes, the importantfinding was that the effects of just missing acategory were stronger than the effects of justmaking it. Medvec and Savitsky interpreted thisdiscrepancy in relation to prospect theory (Kah-neman & Tversky, 1979), which holds thatlosses have more impact than comparably sizedgains in economic decision making; in otherwords, bad is stronger than good.

The picture becomes more complicated withregard to memory, because the defensive pro-cesses may succeed in suppressing memory forunwelcome feedback. Indeed, Kuiper and Derry(1982) found that participants were less likely toremember bad than good trait words after theyhad merely been asked whether the words de-scribed them, which shows a memory biasagainst unwelcome views of self even whenthese were not feedback but merely questions.(Depressed individuals did not have the samebias, however.) Hence, findings of selective for-getting of bad feedback should not be surpris-ing. Mischel, Ebbesen, and Zeiss (1976) found

that participants remembered more positivethan negative feedback, overall, although theeffects were strongest when they either ex-pected success or had had a recent successexperience.

As we noted with self, however, the memorytrace or net result can be biased in favor ofpositive feedback, even if bad feedback is stron-ger, because the bad feedback is processed in amore biased and hostile fashion. Baumeisterand Cairns (1992) examined how individualsprocessed and remembered bad feedback, withspecial attention paid to repressors (who aremost likely to show defensive or self-deceptiveresponses in the relatively mild context of alaboratory study). Bad feedback elicited cleardefensive responses during encoding, and thesedefenses ranged from avoiding exposure toelaborating it with refutational thoughts. Re-pressors recalled the good feedback better thanthe bad feedback overall, although a slight re-versal was found among nonrepressors. In thisstudy, moreover, feedback was mixed to vary-ing degrees, so even the good feedback condi-tion contained some bad feedback, and viceversa. The highest memory scores in the entireexperiment were obtained among repressors forthe small amount of bad feedback embedded inthe generally good feedback. (The next highestwas nonrepressors in that same condition.) In-consistency and salience no doubt contributedto these high memory scores, but inconsistencyand salience should also have operated to im-prove memory for small bits of praise embed-ded in the generally bad feedback; there was notmuch evidence of this. The explanation is ap-parently that when feedback is generally good,people let their defenses down, whereupon anysmall bits of criticism emerge as extremelypowerful and are therefore remembered excep-tionally well. Put another way, bad is clearlystronger than good when the defenses are down.

Taken together, these studies suggest greaterimpact and power for bad than good feedback.The main limitation is that defensive responsessometimes succeed in miminizing the long-termimpact of bad feedback. When these defensesare not operating, however, bad feedback isstronger than good. Moreover, the greater andmore pervasive efforts to minimize bad feed-back than to maximize good feedback reflect amotivational asymmetry that also recognizesbad feedback as more important than good.


Health

The importance of physical health makes it adesirable sphere in which to consider the rela-tive importance of good versus bad outcomes.Although we have not found a great deal ofevidence, there are some findings that fit theidea that bad is stronger than good.

A review of human psychoneuroimmunologyand the biological and environmental factorssuggested that bad events have greater impactthan good ones (Cohen & Herbert, 1996). Nu-merous studies have reported the deleteriouseffects of psychological and physical stress onimmune status. For instance, Glaser, Rice,Sheridan, Fertel, and Stout (1987) and Kiecolt-Glaser et al. (1984) have investigated the effectsof medical school examinations as a form ofpsychological stress on the immune functioningof medical school students. Relative to a low-stress time (e.g., immediately after vacation),students' immune systems are significantlycompromised by the presence of psychologicalstress. Psychological stress results in decreasedactivity of the natural killer cells, which protectthe body against disease (Kiecolt-Glaser et al.,1984). Stress also increases the proliferation oflymphocyte production (e.g., Glaser et al.,1987) and heightens the production of herpesviruses antibodies (e.g., Glaser et al., 1987). Theeffects of negative events such as stress on thebody appear to be not only consistent but alsoswift. In a study of immune cell levels andfunctioning, Herbert, Cohen, Marsland, Bachen,and Rabin (1994) found weakened immune pa-rameters as soon as 5 min after the induction ofthe stressor.

Given that stressful events happen to every-one at some point, researchers have sought toassess whether relaxation techniques wouldyield benefits to physiology comparable to theharm caused by stress. Thus far, the answerappears to be no. There has only been one studyto assess immune functioning after a stress-reduction intervention in the presence of astressful event (Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser, Strain,Stout, & Tarr, 1986). These researchers foundthat training medical students in relaxation tech-niques did not affect the immune changes thatoccurred as the result of stressful first-year ex-ams. Cohen and Herbert (1996) concluded thatthere is little evidence for the benefits of stress-reduction techniques on immunological health.

In other words, bad events impair the body'sprotective system, but good events do notboost it.

A different method of reducing stress is toincrease social support. However, evidencefrom controlled studies on the advantageouseffects of social support is also limited. Onestudy found that residents in a geriatric homewho were visited three times per week by col-lege students showed no change in cellular im-mune functioning (Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser, Wil-liger, Stout, & Messick, 1985). In another study,Arnetz, Wasserman, Petrini, Brenner, and Levi(1987) examined the effect of social support onlymphocyte proliferation. Swedish women whohad been unemployed for more than 9 monthswere given both emotional and informationalsupport (e.g., giving them information on get-ting another job). However, this interventionwas not successful in boosting immunefunctioning.

In contrast, a lack of social support and lone-liness have been shown to have a variety ofdamaging health consequences. Kiecolt-Glaseret al. (1984) found that medical students whoreported high levels of loneliness had weakerimmune functioning than students who did notreport high levels of loneliness. Similarly, psy-chiatric patients who reported high levels ofloneliness also had depressed immune systems.

In summary, various studies and reviews ofthe immunology literature indicate that bad isstronger than good. In particular, researchershave found that stress and the absence of socialsupport are reliably associated with immuno-suppression, whereas their opposites—relax-ation and increases in social support—do notseem to have beneficial effects.

Optimism and pessimism were examined bySchulz, Bookwala, Knapp, Scheier, and Wil-liamson (1996) in an effort to predict the mor-tality of cancer patients. Across 8 months, 70 ofthe 238 patients in a radiation therapy sampledied. Using Scheier and Carver's (1985) LifeOrientation Test, Schulz et al. assessed bothoptimism and pessimism traits. Optimism failedto predict survival, either alone or in interactionwith age. Pessimism, however, did yield a sig-nificant prediction of mortality, although onlyfor the youngest (30-59) age range. (Thus, theonly significant predictor was pessimism inter-acting with age.) Although the results are cor-relational, the longitudinal prediction does en-


hance the plausibility that the trait caused thesurvival outcome rather than vice versa. Theimplication is that the negative thoughts andfeelings associated with pessimism had a stron-ger effect on mortality outcomes than the posi-tive thoughts and feelings that characterizeoptimism.

A similar conclusion emerged from a longi-tudinal study by Robinson-Whelen, Kim, Mac-Callum, and Kiecolt-Glaser (1997). Pessimism,not optimism, uniquely predicted psychologicaland physical health outcomes, 1 year later.More precisely, pessimism during Year 3 sig-nificantly predicted anxiety, stress, and self-rated health (but not depression) in Year 4. Incontrast, optimism during Year 3 did not makea significant contribution to predicting any ofthe outcomes in Year 4. Although the data arecorrelational, the longitudinal design makes itlikely that the causal relationship went frompessimism to the health outcome rather than thereverse.

A very different approach has been taken byPennebaker and his colleagues (Francis & Pen-nebaker, 1992; Greenberg & Stone, 1992; Pen-nebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988) in a program of re-search on how writing about traumatic personalexperiences can affect subsequent health. Inthese studies, participants are typically asked towrite about "the most traumatic experience ofyour entire life," whereas control group partic-ipants write about plans for the day, going tocollege, or minor traumas. People who writeabout their most traumatic experiences typicallyshow significant improvements in physicalhealth, as compared with the control group, onmeasures such as visits to the medical centers,immune system function, and sick days. In anattempt to see what aspects of stories mightpredict (and possibly cause or mediate) thesesubsequent improvements, Pennebaker (1993)subjected the essays from several previous in-vestigations to linguistic analysis and thenchecked these against the data on health out-comes. Participants whose essays had containedmore words referring to negative, unpleasantemotions showed significantly greater improve-ment than those who used fewer such words.Use of words referring to positive emotions had,if anything, the opposite effect (and in any case,the effect for positive emotions was weaker).Even those participants who showed the biggest

increases in the number of references to positiveemotion across the multiple sessions of thestudy (which seemingly should be a sign ofimprovement) failed to show a relative im-provement in health. Pennebaker concluded thatthe participants who consistently expressed themost anxiety, sadness, and other negative feel-ings were the ones who subsequently showedthe greatest gains in health.

Thus far we have considered health as a de-pendent variable, but it can also be consideredas an independent variable (although, again,most work remains correlational). The effects ofhealth on happiness and subjective well-beinghave been studied by several researchers. Theybelieve health has a large impact on happiness(e.g., Diener, 1984), but the actual links tend tobe quite weak across the population. One largeand thorough study concluded that health isirrelevant to happiness, except for older adultsand chronically ill people (Campbell, Converse,& Rodgers, 1976). The exceptions may helpexplain the seemingly mistaken perception thathealth is extremely important for happiness.When health is bad, it does have a major impacton happiness, but variations in good health havesmall or negligible effects. Put another way, thedifference between being moderately sick andvery sick is relatively powerful, whereas thecorresponding difference between being moder-ately well and very well has little impact, sohealth mainly affects happiness when health isbad. Thus, health too conforms to the pattern inwhich bad is stronger than good.

General Discussion

The principle that bad is stronger than goodappears to be consistently supported across abroad range of psychological phenomena. Thequantity and strength of the evidence were notconsistent and in fact varied widely from onetopic to another. The breadth and convergenceof evidence, however, across different areaswere striking, which forms the most importantevidence. In no area were we able to find aconsistent reversal, such that one could draw afirm conclusion that good is stronger than bad.This failure to find any substantial contrary pat-terns occurred despite our own wishes and ef-forts. We had hoped to identify several contrarypatterns, which would have permitted us to de-velop an elaborate, complex, and nuanced the-


ory about when bad is stronger versus whengood is stronger. The most we can say is thatoccasionally other psychological patterns willoverride the greater strength of bad things, andthe greater strength of bad varies with respect tosize, amount of evidence, and methodologicalstrength of evidence. However, the greaterstrength of bad was apparent nearly every-where. Hence, we must conclude that bad isstronger than good at a pervasive, general level.

Let us briefly summarize the evidence. Ineveryday life, bad events have stronger andmore lasting consequences than comparablegood events. Close relationships are moredeeply and conclusively affected by destructiveactions than by constructive ones, by negativecommunications than positive ones, and by con-flict than harmony. Additionally, these effectsextend to marital satisfaction and even to therelationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce).Even outside of close relationships, unfriendlyor conflictual interactions are seen as strongerand have bigger effects than friendly, harmoni-ous ones. Bad moods and negative emotionshave stronger effects than good ones on cogni-tive processing, and the bulk of affect regulationefforts is directed at escaping from bad moods(e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging goodmoods). That suggests that people's desire toget out of a bad mood is stronger than theirdesire to get into a good one. The preponder-ance of words for bad emotions, contrasted withthe greater frequency of good emotions, sug-gests that bad emotions have more power. Somepatterns of learning suggest that bad things aremore quickly and effectively learned than cor-responding good things. The lack of a positivecounterpart to the concept of trauma is itself asign that single bad events often have effectsthat are much more lasting and important thanany results of single good events. Bad parentingcan be stronger than genetic influences; goodparenting is not. Research on social support hasrepeatedly found that negative, conflictual be-haviors in one's social network have strongereffects than positive, supportive behaviors. Badthings receive more attention and more thor-ough cognitive processing than good things.When people first learn about one another, badinformation has a significantly stronger impacton the total impression than any comparablegood information. The self appears to be morestrongly motivated to avoid the bad than to

embrace the good. Bad stereotypes and reputa-tions are easier to acquire, and harder to shed,than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger ef-fects than good feedback. Bad health has agreater impact on happiness than good health,and health itself is more affected by pessimism(the presence or absence of a negative outlook)than optimism (the presence or absence of apositive outlook).

Convergence is also provided by Rozin andRoyzman (in press). Quite independently of thisproject, these authors reviewed the literature oninteractions between good and bad, and they tooconcluded that bad things generally prevail. Ourreview has emphasized independent, parallel ef-fects of good and bad factors, whereas theirsemphasized good and bad factors competingdirectly against each other in the same situation(such as contagion). Both approaches have con-firmed the greater power of bad factors.

Thus, the greater impact of bad than good isextremely pervasive. It is found in both cogni-tion and motivation; in both inner, intrapsychicprocesses and in interpersonal ones; in connec-tion with decisions about the future and to alimited extent with memories of the past; and inanimal learning, complex human informationprocessing, and emotional responses.

Searching for Exceptions

Given the scope and variety of the evidence,the appropriate question to ask is not whetherbad is generally stronger than good but rather,how general or universal is this pattern? Whenwe began this review, we anticipated findingsome exceptions that would demarcate the lim-its of the phenomenon. Although a few isolatedstudies have deviated from the general pattern,we were unable to locate any significant spheresin which good was consistently stronger thanbad. At most, the greater power of bad canoccasionally be overridden, such as when pos-itive information is made to be more diagnosticthan negative information (Skowronski & Carls-ton, 1989, 1992)—but even in this instance, thegreater power of bad than good can be foundlurking in the background (Martijn et al., 1992).

The closest to a general reversal was in an-ticipation of future events, insofar as prevailingoptimism about the future reflects a greaterpower of good future events (e.g., Weinstein,1980). Even this pattern, however, did not con-


stitute a reliable exception. When people aremaking decisions about specific, impendingevents, they seem more motivated to avoid badoutcomes than to pursue good ones, at least inmany cases in which the magnitude of the twooutcomes has been carefully calibrated to be thesame (as the gambling studies showed).

A related pattern showing a preference forgood is the so-called "pollyanna hypothesis,"which suggests that people are biased towardmore positive ideas and conclusions. Boucherand Osgood (1969) observed that "there is auniversal human tendency to use evaluativelypositive (E+) words more frequently . . . thanevaluatively negative words (E-)" (p. 1). Simi-larly, Matlin and Stang (1978) observed thatnegative words consist more often of a positiveroot that becomes negative by a prefix (e.g.,unpleasant) than the reverse. Likewise, whenpeople are instructed to attribute traits to a targetperson, they tend to assign more positive thannegative ones, with approximate proportions of62% positive and 38% negative (e.g., Adams-Webber, 1977; Benjafield, 1984; Benjafield &Adams-Webber, 1976; Tuohy & Stradling,1987). Still, such findings are not really contraryevidence, and, in fact, they may help perpetuatethe greater power of bad by keeping it in theminority so that it remains more salient (e.g.,Berlyne, 1971). One could also suggest that thepreference for positive words and positive traitsmakes the greater power of bad ones especiallyremarkable because it must overcome bias. Ourview is simply that the greater frequency ofgood is the natural complement to the greaterpower of bad: Good can only match or over-come bad by strength of numbers.

The memory literature also yielded severalfindings demonstrating a reversal of the bad isstronger than good pattern. This reversal ap-pears to be driven by two distinct processes: aself-enhancement effect whereby negative memo-ries were suppressed or positive memories ac-cessed, and a mood congruency whereby non-depressed individuals (the majority) showed atendency for recalling information that was pos-itively valenced and thus matched their currentmood. At least in memory, the bad is strongerthan good effect will at times take a back seat toother psychological principles. Still, the occa-sional finding of greater recall for positive ex-periences probably reflects a selective and mo-tivated process by which bad memories are sup-

pressed, so it does not really indicate that thebad experiences had lesser power. The veryemergence of processes designed to suppressunpleasant memories can be regarded as a tes-timonial to the power of bad experiences.

There was also some evidence that positiveand negative events have differential effects onmemory. Some researchers have found that peo-ple remember pleasant events better than un-pleasant events (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Holmes,1970). However, we found as many or morestudies indicating that negative events leave alonger and more lasting mark on memory (e.g.,Banaji & Hardin, 1994; Skowronski & Carl-ston, 1987; see the Memory section in this arti-cle). Although our search did yield some mixedevidence on the effects of bad versus good onmemory, the overall consensus was that, at leastin the short term, bad has a greater impact onmemory (e.g., Bless et al., 1992; Dreben et al.,1979); with time, it seems that there exist cog-nitive operations to reduce the longevity of thiseffect (e.g., Walker et al., 1997).

There are individual differences in the degreeto which people are oriented toward good ver-sus bad. Nondepressed people seem to seek outpositive information and avoid negative infor-mation more than depressed ones, as noted inseveral spheres. These include optimism regard-ing the future (Taylor & Brown, 1988) andbiased recall for positive information (Matt etal., 1992). There are also repressors who sys-tematically ignore negative information aboutthe self (e.g., Baumeister & Cairns, 1992). Like-wise, there are well-established individual dif-ferences in general tendencies toward approachand avoidance motivation (Elliot & Covington,2001) that may be linked to the relative re-sponse to bad and good stimuli. These excep-tions seem, however, to reflect preference forgood over bad rather than subjective impact,and many of those individuals are actuallystrongly affected by bad events when they doconfront them. The individuals for whom goodis actually stronger than bad constitute a smalland atypical minority.

Another factor to consider is the possibilitythat overall bad outweighs good (i.e., there is amain effect for bad vs. good) but that the type ofoutcome may moderate the strength of the ef-fect. That is, if the dependent measures arebroken down into negative (e.g., judging howclumsy a target is) versus positive (e.g., judging


how graceful a target is), the bad and good willaffect the positive measures, but only the badwill affect the negative measures. Although nu-merous studies in this review (e.g., Major et al.,1997) showed this pattern, it was not consistentenough for us to pronounce this a true boundarycondition. However, the idea is intriguing andsuggests directions for future research. For in-stance, in attempts to use a manipulation thatproduces the strongest effects, researcherswould be wise to use something bad so as toinfluence both positive and negative outcomes.

The general lack of reliable counterexampleshas made it difficult to specify boundary condi-tions on the general rule that bad is strongerthan good. Indeed, when reviewing the evi-dence, we had hoped to find more exceptions,reversals, moderator variables, and boundaryconditions. The presence of these factors wouldhave made for a more sophisticated and nu-anced theory as to why bad would be strongerthan good. Accordingly, the lack of these vari-ables renders it somewhat difficult to formulatea theory that can account for such broad andconsistent findings. The safest conclusion, then,is that the bad is stronger than good effect is arobust and broad-level psychological principlethat underlies a range of psychological phenom-enon and operates in the company of a limitednumber of similarly broad principles.

Revisiting Theory

We began this article by briefly suggestingthat the relative strength of bad over good is anadaptive response of the human organism to itsphysical and social environment. In view ofhow pervasive the relative strength of bad is, itseems unlikely that this pattern is maladaptive.In particular, we found that bad was strongerthan good with regard to health, social support,and learning—all of which are importantspheres for adaptations. It seems especially un-likely that maladaptive patterns would have re-mained powerful there. We also noted that peo-ple for whom good is stronger than bad (e.g.,people insensitive to pain or to guilt) seemprone to misfortunes and early deaths; this too isconsistent with the view that it is adaptive forbad events to have greater power. We turn nowto the question of why bad would be strongerthan good across such diverse areas and withsuch reliability.

Is it adaptive? At the broadest level, weargue that bad is stronger than good becauseresponding to the world in this way is adaptive.

Generally, individuals who are attuned topreventing and rectifying bad things shouldflourish and thrive more than individuals ori-ented primarily toward maximizing goodthings. This argument is admittedly speculative.

The broadest argument we can devise isbased on a change in motivational states in thepresence of negative events, stimuli, and infor-mation. When considering why bad outweighsgood, an intriguing possibility is that bad thingsindicate a need for the self to change somethingabout itself; that is, that bad things prompt self-regulation. Through self-regulation, an organ-ism can adapt and change itself to fit its envi-ronment, a strategy that is adaptive, given thatthe organisms most likely to reproduce are thosethat can be flexible in the face of ever-changingcircumstances. Rigid adherence to behavioralpatterns that were useful in the past is not ef-fective when met with new challenges andthreats. Thus, one of the best methods of in-creasing survival and gene transmission is to beclosely attuned to the current environmentalcontingencies. Moreover, changing the environ-ment to fit the self is neither effective nor prac-tical as a route to maximize evolutionary fitness.

A related argument is that progress may bebest facilitated by having bad events have alasting impact while good events have a tempo-rary one. This too is based on the idea that badevents signal a need for change, whereas goodones do not. If satisfaction and pleasure werepermanent, there might be little incentive tocontinue seeking further benefits or advances.The ephemeral nature of good feelings maytherefore stimulate progress (which is adaptive).If bad feelings wore off, however, people mightrepeat their mistakes, so genuine progresswould best be served by having the effects ofbad events linger for a relatively long time.

Organisms require not only a system to signalthe need for change, but also one that commu-nicates quickly and intensely, with little energyor effort required and without awareness, be-cause the necessary change may require swiftresponding. Empirical findings have demon-strated that bad things satisfy these criteria. Re-search confirms that negative stimuli havegreater influence on neural responses than pos-itive stimuli (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo,


1998); that negative traits, relative to positivetraits, have greater influence on the overall im-pression of another person (Peeters & Czapin-ski, 1990); and that negative trait adjectivescommand more attention, at a nonconsciouslevel, than positive trait adjectives (Pratto &John, 1991).

In summary, it may be that humans and ani-mals show heightened awareness of and re-sponded more quickly to negative informationbecause it signals a need for change. Hence, theadaptiveness of self-regulation partly lies in theorganism's ability to detect when responsemodifications are necessary and when they areunnecessary. Moreover, the lessons learnedfrom bad events should ideally be retained per-manently so that the same dangers or costs arenot encountered repeatedly. Meanwhile, goodevents (such as those that provide a feeling ofsatisfaction and contentment) should ideallywear off so that the organism is motivated tocontinue searching for more and better out-comes. As a result, organisms that possessmechanisms for adept perception and process-ing of negative cues will achieve greater fitnesswith the environment and, consequently, willhave a greater chance of surviving threats andmore successful reproductive attempts.

A related argument might be made on thebasis of social (and biological) systems. In orderfor a system to function effectively, each com-ponent of the system must do its part. If onecomponent breaks down, the entire system canbe disrupted. Hence, at the level of the individ-ual on the system, bad is undeniably strongerthan good. Any individual part can prevent thesystem from functioning; but no individual partcan by itself cause the system to succeed. Thisis especially true of social groups (or at leastthose marked by division of labor): Water mustbe found, food must be obtained and distrib-uted, predators must be kept away, and enemiesmust be intimidated or defeated. No one ofthose successes can ensure the group's survival,but failure in any of those spheres can ensure itsdemise. Biological systems have similar prop-erties, and if even one vital organ ceases tofunction (heart, lungs, brain, stomach), the per-son will die. This concept was proposed underthe name of the chain principle by Weinberg(1975; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). A chain'sefficacy depends on its weakest link, and weak-ening any one link weakens the entire chain;

whereas strengthening any one link (other thanthe weakest) or adding stronger links will haveminimal effect on the chain's overall strength.

A final consideration is that bad has greaterpower because good entails consistency acrosstime and events, which cannot be created by asingle good event but can be destroyed by asingle bad one (see Rozin & Royzman, inpress). The importance of stability with regardto good things may well have contributed toevolving a broad orientation to respond morestrongly to bad than good. In a crucial sense, thestability argument is linked to the asymmetry oflife and death: The individual remains aliveafter several years only if he or she managed tosurvive every single day, and no degree of op-timal experience on any given day can offset theeffects of failing to survive on another. Individ-uals who failed to emphasize the consistencyand stability of good outcomes might well havetaken more extreme risks in pursuit of power-fully good outcomes and hence failed to surviveand reproduce. In this way, natural selectionwould have shaped the human organism to givehigh priority to consistency and stability, whichin turn would foster the basic orientation thatbad is stronger than good.

In summary, the propensity to experience badas stronger than good may confer a significantadaptive advantage for individuals, such thatthose who mobilized their attention and re-sources toward the bad would be more likely tosurvive and reproduce. To see how life wouldbe lived if bad were not stronger than good, wecan look to the rare individuals who are bornwith a congenital insensitivity to pain. Theseindividuals do experience pleasurable physicalsensations to a relatively greater extent and in-tensity than negative ones. Yet they tend to diefrom physical mishaps stemming from their in-ability to feel pain, with children reportedlybiting off their fingers or tongues and sufferingsevere burns from contact with hot surfaces andadults having to find substitute signals for pain.For example, one sufferer was reported to notfeel a ruptured appendix and therefore failed toseek treatment in time; another suffered severespinal deformations as a result of neglectingproper posture (Sternbach, 1968). Thus, as hu-mans, we are well served by having bad stron-ger than good, on both a personal level and anevolutionary level.


Insights from prior theory. Researchersconcerned with impression formation have al-ready debated some of these theoretical issuesbecause their area is the main one in which thepredominant strength of the bad side has beenrecognized (also known as the positive-nega-tive asymmetry). Kellermann (1984) examinedthe greater power of negativity in initial inter-actions. She managed to articulate six differenttheories: the first three were based on the greaterfrequency of good than bad information, whichmakes bad information more salient and per-haps more powerful in other ways. As Keller-mann noted, however, salience does not reallyprovide a full and satisfactory explanation, par-ticularly for laboratory experiments in whichpositive information is made equally salient.One might, however, revive this theory by pro-posing, at the broadest level, that life as a wholehas more good than bad events, such that badevents will inevitably stand out (even if on alocal basis, such as in a given laboratory exper-iment, their frequency is made comparable togood events). One might even suggest that thelives of American and Western European citi-zens (from whom the majority of data are col-lected) are exceptional in the disproportionatelyhigh frequency of good events, and that if re-searchers were to study people who live inharsh, desperate times, individual good eventswould be relatively rare and might thereforehave greater power by virtue of this salience.

Another theory was that negative informationis actually more informative, insofar as it de-parts more from what is normative: People aresupposed to behave well, and so bad acts defysocial and situational pressures and hence arepresumably more revealing about the inner dis-positions of the actors (and therefore morelikely to promote correspondent inferences; seeJones & Davis, 1965). Extremity of information(Fiske, 1980) is also relevant because extremelypositive information can also be quite informa-tive, so the informativeness hypothesis is a vari-ation on the correspondent-inference theory.Kellermann's (1984) review leaned toward fa-voring the view that bad information is moreinformative (based on extremity and distancefrom the average or norm). Skowronski andCarlston (1989) likewise favored the view thatbad events carry more weight in forming im-pressions because they are more diagnostic ofthe traits and dispositions of individuals. Even if

this assessment is correct, however, it is con-fined to the sphere of forming impressions ofnewly met acquaintances, so something addi-tional would be needed if there is indeed a moregeneral pattern in which bad is stronger thangood.

Working from a perception background,Wright (1991) has proposed a "fundamentalnegative bias" (p. 471) in which perception willbe guided more by negative than positiveevents. She also proposed that this negativitywill carry over into the thoughts and feelingsfollowing the initial perception. Furthermore,she proposed that these effects are likely to bestrongest to the extent that the stimulus is salientand the context is vague or sparse. A rich con-text may mitigate the effect of the stimulus,whereas salience should enhance it. We note,however, that if bad is indeed stronger thangood, then it is plausible that a mitigating con-text might nullify the effects of good, positiveinformation even more thoroughly than the ef-fects of bad, negative information. In this sense,the logic behind Wright's proposition is notentirely persuasive. Then again, Wright mightsimply have meant that the differential impactof negative information may be clearest whenall effects are strongest, which means in theabsence of mitigating context.

Wright's (1991) account is thus again at besta partial explanation. If perception has a funda-mental negative bias, then most other psycho-logical phenomena will show the same asym-metry to the extent that they depend on percep-tion. The perceptual asymmetry, however,requires explaining itself, so again we are leftsearching for a more comprehensive explanation.

The same problem is found in Maslow's(1968) motivational theories. Although he didnot explicitly speak of the superior power of badover good, he did propose that the most basicand primary motivations involve escaping fromaversive states, such as hunger, deprivation,cold, and danger. The more positive motiva-tions of seeking esteem, love, belongingness,and self-actualization only begin to direct be-havior when the negative or deficiency (histerm) motives have been satisfied. As withWright's (1991) perception-based theory,Maslow's motivation-based theory can effec-tively explain why affect, cognition, and behav-ior give precedence to escaping the bad, insofaras these responses depend on motivation. How-


ever, the reason for the motivational asymmetryis simply postulated rather than explained. Inour view, these patterns point back toward evo-lutionary selection. We have suggested that sur-vival and reproduction (in K-selected species)depend on giving priority to avoiding bad ratherthan pursuing good. If this argument is broadlycorrect, it would hardly be surprising that thebasic phenomena of perception and motivationwould already show signs of this bias.

A more sophisticated theoretical formulationby Taylor (1991) is also relevant. Indeed, in herarticle, she devoted some space to documentingthe greater power of negative than positiveevents. Taylor proposed that aversive eventsproduce complex cognitive and affective reac-tions that good, desirable events do not becausethe bad events present problems that requiresolving. One can thus ignore something goodmore easily than something bad. In Taylor'saccount, bad events set off two relevant sets ofresponses: the first mobilizes resources to meetthe threat, and the second tries to minimize thedamage or trauma afterward. In contrast, pleas-ant events can be quietly and passively enjoyedwithout either the mobilization or theminimization.

Taylor's (1991) theory addresses a differentproblem than the one with which we are con-cerned. The mobilization and minimization pat-terns she delineated could be entirely correcteven if good were stronger than bad. The extracognitive and affective work involved in re-sponding to bad events (as opposed to goodones) would contribute something to the greaterpsychological impact of bad events, insofar asmore effort may be required and more extensiveprocessing may leave clearer psychologicaltraces (e.g., improving memory). Then again, tothe extent that the minimization process is suc-cessful, the long-term impact of bad events mayturn out to be less than the impact of goodevents: People do not minimize good events, sothese may live on even as the psyche attemptsto purge its memory of prior woes andmisfortunes.

A motivational account of the differentialeffects of bad versus good has been proposed byCacioppo and colleagues (e.g., Cacioppo &Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo, Gardner, & Bernt-son, 1997). They proposed a negativity bias intheir model of evaluative space, such that com-parable degrees of activation have greater ef-

fects on the negative, as opposed to positive,motivational system. Accordingly, there is asteeper slope for the relationship between theactivation and motivational response for nega-tive stimuli. Several investigations have con-firmed this negativity bias (Bradley, Lang, &Cuthbert, 1997; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994;Ito et al., 1998).

In summary, it is apparent that prior work hascontributed an important set of mid-level theo-ries about the relative power of good versus badevents. Taken alone, these formulations and in-sights do not provide a full accounting for whybad should be stronger than good as a generalpsychological principle. The most sophisticatedtheories about the asymmetry in impression for-mation appear to zero in on diagnosticity andcorrespondence of inferences, which are spe-cific to impression formation and could not eas-ily apply, say, to taste aversion learning ortrauma. We found that bad was stronger thangood in a remarkably broad and diverse set ofphenomena. A specific or mid-level theory maynot be broad enough to account for it. Instead, itappears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychol-ogy that bad is stronger than good.

Implications

The role of culture. Our review focused ex-clusively on the individual's experience of badand good and concluded that experiencing badas stronger than good is adaptive to the individ-ual. In other words, nature may have shaped thehuman psyche to treat bad as stronger thangood. Culture, however, would not necessarilyhave to conform to this. In fact, if one considersthe myths and ideals that cultures present, theredoes not seem to be any clear message that badis stronger.

For example, religion is widely regarded as asupremely cultural phenomenon. In recent mil-lennia, religious ideas have emphasized salva-tion as much as retribution (e.g., Eliade, 1982,1985). Heaven and hell are equally extreme inthe Christian tradition, and there seems littlebasis for assuming that hell is in any sense morepowerful or extreme than heaven. Indeed, inmost modern nations, belief in hell is signifi-cantly less widespread than belief in heaven(e.g., Aries, 1981), which might be construed asindicating that the cultural ideas emphasizegood more strongly than bad.


Love has likewise received idealization incultural mythology that has made of it a moreextreme good than is empirically justified.Songs, films, novels, and wedding vows con-tinue to promise that love is forever, eventhough the statistics on divorce, marriage ther-apy, and infidelity indicate that it is not. In fact,Baumeister (1991) concluded that cultural ide-als of fulfillment have a general pattern ofpromising more permanence than is typicallyfound, whether these fulfillments involve love,happiness, spiritual enlightenment, fame andcelebrity, wealth, creativity, or others.

Thus, culture certainly presents individualswith mythical images of extreme possibilities inboth directions. Probably the reason for this isthat these cultural myths are important meansby which a society can motivate its individualsto behave in socially desirable ways, and miti-gating the extremity of the myth would simplyweaken the motivations. In particular, culturemay find it optimal to encourage people to delaygratification over periods that are far longer thanwhat prevailed in our evolutionary history. Asjust one example, the multiyear process of at-tending college or graduate school is probablybest sustained by a positive image of how won-derful life will be afterward, whereas nature hasfew contingencies that require one to adopt sucha long-range time perspective.

Happiness. We have concluded that bad isstronger than good, yet a wealth of data suggestthat life is good and people are largely happy(D. G. Myers, 1992). How can good overcomethe greater power of bad to make life seeminglyso wonderful? There are several answers.

Good can overcome bad by force of numbers.To maximize the power of good, these numbersmust be increased. This can be done by creatingmore goods. For example, in a romantic rela-tionship each partner can make an effort to benice to the other consistently. Such small acts ofkindness are important for combating the badsthat will typically occur. Indeed, if Gottman(1994) is correct, the ratio should be at least fivegoods for every bad. Likewise, individuals canmake an effort to recognize and appreciate thegoods that they have—celebrating each smallsuccess, being thankful for health, and havinggratitude for supportive others.

Another contributor to the perception of lifeas good involves selective perception and mem-ory. As Taylor (1991) argued, the human

psyche has powerful mechanisms for retrospec-tively minimizing bad experiences. Althoughboth good and bad feelings may fade with time,the bad ones are actively suppressed; whereasthe good memories may be cultivated and sus-tained (e.g., through reminiscence). By thesame token, people may treat bad experiencesas isolated events while integrating good onesinto an ongoing general perception of goodness.In this way, individuals may sustain a broadlyfavorable view of their lives. Something likethis must after all be operating in most mar-riages, given that most people rate their mar-riages favorably, but half of marriages end indivorce. Probably they rate their marriage fa-vorably (by regarding the problems as tempo-rary or exceptions) until they begin to contem-plate divorce seriously.

These considerations are quite consistentwith the view that the good life consists of aconsistent pattern of good outcomes, even ifthese are individually relatively small and weak.A few bad outcomes can be minimized by mak-ing external attributions or regarding them asunimportant, thereby preserving the subjectiveimpression of a stable pattern of good out-comes. As long as the individual perceives thatpattern of consistent goodness, life may seemstrongly good overall even if nothing stronglygood ever happens.

Learning and child development. We havealso noted that certain areas are characterized bya belief in the superior power of good. Theseareas include learning and child development.We presented research earlier to suggest thatsuch beliefs are mistaken. Specifically, punish-ment produces faster learning than reward, andbad parenting has a stronger effect than goodparenting. Still, it is possible that some genuineexceptions can be found in these areas. On theother hand, it may be that ethical and practicalconcerns are mainly responsible for the advo-cacy of reward instead of punishment. Anyseeming disadvantage of punishment (as com-pared with reward) in promoting learning mayarise because punishment has side effects thatinterfere with effective learning, so punishmentmay be quite strong in general. Ethical andpolitical concerns may make people reluctant tohit their children, and those individuals who dohit may sometimes encounter resentments andother long-term problems, but these concerns donot prove that punishment is itself weak. In


other words, punishment may not be optimal foreducation, even if it does produce optimal learn-ing, because the side effects of punishment canbe damaging.

The question about punishment and learningraises a broader issue. To examine whether re-ward or punishment promotes better learning isto look for only one kind of effect—in particu-lar, a good one (insofar as learning is good). Ina number of the studies we have reviewed here,researchers found that positive independentvariables affected positive dependent variables,whereas negative independent variables af-fected negative dependent variables—althoughoften the negative independent variables alsoaffected the positive dependent variables. Putmore simply, good affects good, whereas badaffects both bad and good. If one were to lookonly at good outcomes, however, one mightwell often find that good and bad events haveroughly equal impact, and sometimes the goodevents will show up as stronger. This would,however, be a misleading conclusion caused bythe one-sided focus on good outcomes. Onlywhen the range of outcomes includes both goodand bad ones, such as illness versus health, or ahappy marriage versus a divorce, or liking ver-sus disliking, can one claim to have provided afull and balanced assessment of the relativepower of good and bad causes.

Concluding Remarks

In our review, we have found bad to bestronger than good in a disappointingly relent-less pattern. We hope that this article may stim-ulate researchers to search for and identify ex-ceptions; that is, spheres or circumstances inwhich good events outweigh bad ones. Giventhe large number of patterns in which bad out-weighs good, however, any reversals are likelyto remain as mere exceptions. The lack of ex-ceptions suggests how basic and powerful is thegreater power of bad. In our view, this differ-ence may be one of the most basic and far-reaching psychological principles.

Although it may seem pessimistic to con-clude that bad is stronger than good, we do notthink that such pessimism is warranted. As wehave suggested, there are several reasons tothink that it may be highly adaptive for humanbeings to respond more strongly to bad thangood. In the final analysis, then, the greater

power of bad may itself be a good thing. More-over, good can still triumph in the end by forceof numbers. Even though a bad event may havea stronger impact than a comparable goodevent, many lives can be happy by virtue ofhaving far more good than bad events.

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Received March 15, 2001Revision received April 16, 2001

Accepted April 16, 2001 •

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