Bad is stronger than good

Positive emotions don’t drive the plot. Negative ones do.

In 2001, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published a paper that’s become a modern classic in the field. It’s called “Bad is Stronger than Good.”

Their argument is that wherever you look in psychology, people are more sensitive to bad things than good ones. For example, a classic finding in psychology is what’s known as propinquity: the biggest predictor of whether we make friends with someone is how close we live to them. They point out that a subsequent study showed that, on average, living close to someone was more likely to turn them into an enemy than a friend.

In studies of marriages, where researchers record an interaction between a couple then see which factors predict whether or not that couple eventually divorces, the positive aspects of the interaction have almost no predictive power. The negative aspects do.

Baumeister and his colleagues surveyed versions of this effect across emotion (there are more words for negative emotions than positive ones), learning (people only need one negative example to learn not to do something—the so-called hot stove effect—and that lesson seems to never fully go away), child development (the good things parents do in raising kids seem to be a lot less impactful than the bad ones), memory (we remember bad events longer and in greater detail than good ones), stereotypes (they’re usually bad), and so on.

Baumeister and his colleagues write:

This is not to say that bad will always triumph over good, spelling doom and misery for the human race. Rather, good may prevail over bad by superior force of numbers: Many good events overcome the psychological effects of a single bad one. When equal measures of good and bad are present, however, the psychological effects of bad ones outweigh those of the good ones.

Since I finished my PhD, I let go of writing on Meaning Lab. I’ve now settled in a new job (researcher in humanities and social sciences for AI at the Alan Turing Institute in London). I’m ready to get back into writing.

This Baumeister paper felt like the right entree for a return to Substack. It has a certain resonance, I think, with our societal moment.

[P.S., I’m experimenting with ways of incorporating AI into my writing process; below I asked Claude to interview me about the paper and its themes. The prompts come from the AI, but the responses are mine. I’ve edited its text, but only a bit.]

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What drew you to make this connection between Baumeister’s paper and the role of negative events in storytelling?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The concept of positive valence is dramatically overvalued in psychological research. Whenever we talk about meaning in psychology, we tend to talk about positive events. We assume that meaning is like happiness, that you can just gather up all the things or experience which give you that warm fuzzy feeling and that’s the stuff of meaning in life. But when you look at the way people talk about meaning, the things they’re building on more often are negative.

For example, a classic text on this topic is Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. What’s that book about? Is it about Frankl’s 7 tips for success in the boardroom? No, it’s about his time in a concentration camp—the absolute epitome of human darkness. Frankl’s account centers around negative events (to put it lightly), not positive ones. If our theory of meaning only accounts for light and fluffy “human flourishing,” it seems like we’re going to miss out on a lot of stuff that really matters.​​​​​​​​​​​

Can you think of a specific negative event in your own life that, looking back, was particularly meaningful or transformative? What made it meaningful rather than just painful?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

My own experiences aren’t as traumatic as Frankl’s. But I think there’s a pervasive message in the modern world, which is: negativity can be eliminated. This is the whole ethos of Silicon Valley. Any minor annoyance or suboptimality in life can be fixed by bolstering it with a superior technology. It’s all about eliminating friction. So the ideal world in the tech imagination—the one whose promise they’re selling you on at least—is one with no pain points.

But when I look at my own life, I see pain points. I see them in my relationships with friends and with my partner; I see them in my job; I see them in the million little ways the world just tries to get you done. If I’m looking at this through the Silicon Valley lens, I see a kind of failure to optimize. The implication is that if I still have those pain points, it’s simply because I haven’t done the work of finding a better solution.

Things look a lot different through the lens of meaning. From this perspective, the presence of bad things is not a negative signal. It is not a signal that you’re doing something wrong. It is not a failure to optimize or discover an elegant solution. The presence of bad things is a signal that you’re human. Bad things are part of the fabric of human experience. It’s about what you do with them, and how you reckon with them in your own internal narrative that matters.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Here’s a bit more of a speculative question: If we imagine a world where technology actually succeeded in eliminating all friction and negative experiences - a kind of “frictionless utopia” - do you think we would still be recognizably human? What would happen to our capacity for meaning-making in such a world?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It would be a world without meaning as we know it. The thing about the human capacity for meaning is that it’s incredibly flexible. And we get better at telling meaningful stories for a diversity of experiences. A couple millennia ago, you maybe had only a few broad brushes to paint with. There was tragedy, comedy, the hero’s journey—these were recognizable templates to the audiences who were engaging with these works and the authors who were composing them. The point is not that works from this era lack nuance or are without value. It’s that we’ve now found ways to tell stories—novels, plays, TV shows, comic strips—about everything from two guys waiting for someone who never shows up to a single day in the life of some Irish guy. If we ever found ourselves in the frictionless utopia of the future, there’s no doubt we’d find ways of wringing meaning from it.

That said, there’s a big difference between whether it’s possible to squeeze meaning out of an experience via literary expertise versus whether it’s easy or natural to do so. In that case, the answer would be no: we’d be more adrift than ever. One of the refrains I reach for most often is that humans are natural storytellers but not necessarily good ones. Sure, Samuel Backett or James Joyce or Han Kang can come up with these sophisticated ways of spinning stories out of nothing, but what about the rest of us?

The truth is that this is one of the problems of modernity. The stories we naturally tell are those of a previous world. They’re simple stories about good and evil, right and wrong, gods and devils, heroes and villains, knights and damsels. That’s not the world we live in. As our lives become more comfortable, it becomes harder to tell the kind of stories to imbue our experiences with a similar level of meaning or intrigue or purpose we would get when the plot was about fighting off bad guys or struggling to meet a basic need. In the modern world, there isn’t a beautiful woman trapped in the castle waiting for you to save her. There’s a thousand young professionals who have their own thing going on, and you have to tell from a 10 second snapshot of their life whether you think their thing could align to yours. That’s a much harder story to tell in a way that’s compelling and coherent.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Bringing this back to the paper, Baumeister argues that bad is stronger than good across psychological phenomena. In storytelling, do you think this “negative dominance” might actually be adaptive - like a cognitive shortcut that helps us create meaning more easily? Put another way: Is the outsize impact of negative events perhaps a feature rather than a bug of our meaning-making system?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You can definitely look at meaning in terms evolutionary adaptation. I think the story is this: meaning comes from plot. Meaning-making is your ability to say why a person or event moves a given plot forward. It’s the answer to the question ‘Why does this matter?’ in the context of a specific narrative. In humanity’s environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, the key plot line was survival and procreation. As our linguistic abilities became more sophisticated, we developed better ways of convincing others of our own centrality within the larger enterprise of the group. So the more ‘meaningful’ you could make your own contributions out to be, the more the group would value you. The better your selection of mates. The more likely you were to pass on your genes. The more likely our species was to produce individuals with a drive for meaning-making and storytelling.

Now, I’m not an evolutionary biologist. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some specific aspect of that is inconsistent with the historical record of human evolution. But the general point I think is solid: the evolutionary function of what we think of as meaning was to convince others in our group of our own crucial role in group efforts. The people who were better at that were more likely to pass on their genes.

All that said, Baumeister’s evolutionary argument is broader than meaning. It’s that what kills you isn’t the good stuff; it’s the bad stuff. Those individuals who paid more attention to stuff that could kill them had more kids. And so we ended up with a species which is, on the whole, more sensitive to bad than good.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

That's interesting - you’re drawing a distinction between two different evolutionary pressures: one that shaped our general negativity bias (avoiding death) and another that shaped our meaning-making abilities (social coordination and status).

Here’s a potentially provocative question: Do you think modern meaning-making has become partially decoupled from its evolutionary origins? It seems like we’ve taken these cognitive tools that evolved for survival and group cohesion and started using them in much more abstract ways - like finding meaning in art, or philosophy, or even in failure itself. Is this perhaps why modern meaning-making feels more difficult - because we're using these tools in ways they weren’t “designed” for?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There’s a difference between our cognitive tools for finding meaning and the kind of meaning we know how to find. Up until quite recently these were aligned. People may not have discussed their lives in terms of purpose or meaning or self-actualization. But they knew where they fit in the plot.

I’m an American living in London, and this is something I realized about the British class system a while back. As an American, I grew up believing (and in most instances in my adult life still believe) that it’s important for a person to aspire to be better than they currently are. In America, the default story is that you should spend your life attempting to raise your station in society. If you’re not doing that, then you’re just sort of wasting space in America—that’s the implication, at least. But in a society with more explicit class boundaries like Britain, the difference is that it’s okay to be who you are. There’s a place for you in society, even if that role isn’t necessarily the top one. There’s recognized value in that, even if the role is a minor one. You know where you fit in the plot. (Literally: a Dickens novel is essentially a stream of encounters with minor Britons.) Whereas in America, if you’re a tech worker who isn’t Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you really need to keep at it until you’ve reached that level. Now, I’m not endorsing classes or castes, but I do think we in America often miss how daunting that implication is: that whoever you currently are, it’s not enough.

The point is that while technology gives us more opportunity, it also burdens us. It puts the pressure for meaning-making on the individual. Historically, this is not where the pressure goes. In fact, the concept of meaning itself implies a kind of individualism. This is why the modern usage of meaning wasn’t common until relatively recently. It was something given to you by the community. It didn’t come with individual autonomy. That was incredibly limiting. But it also gave you a ready answer, rather than shoving you out the door and telling you to go look for one on your own.

As with everything that technology touches, it puts more power in the hands of the individual person. But it’s also made the effective use of that power far more burdensome as well.

Let’s return more directly to ‘ thesis.

You mentioned earlier that negative events are crucial for plot development in novels. In your view, is this literary pattern just reflecting the psychological reality Baumeister identifies - that bad is stronger than good in how we process experiences? Or is there something specific about narrative structure itself that requires negative events to function?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, whereas unhappy families are unhappy in the different ways. He took this as all the justification he needed to talk about an unhappy family for the next 800 pages.

From a narrative perspective, contentment is boring. It’s placid. It’s an emotion of stasis. Most positive emotions, like contentment make you want to stay where you are. Most negative emotions, like anger, make you want to go somewhere new. Stories are about going somewhere new. In order to progress a narrative, someone somewhere has to want something they don’t currently have.

In that sense, bad is definitely stronger than good when it comes to moving forward the plot. But I also think in a way it doesn’t have to be, at least not the extent we intuitively assume. In a story with mass market appeal like Mission: Impossible or James Bond or a Marvel movie, the bad thing driving the plot has to be really obviously bad, like the world getting blown up. Everyone can relate to why that’s bad. But one of the things we get better at over time is to tell stories that are a lot more nuanced, that carve up the core elements of the human experience in a more subtle way or in a way that wouldn’t be obvious to everyone.

For example, in A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, he took the heft of a Victorian novel (where the plot is essentially: domestic life, but do it with gravitas) and set it in Trinidad. The crucial implication there is that you don’t actually need all the fancy British upper class stuff to make that kind of story feel important. That’s a really difficult thing to show when no one has given you a template for how to do it. Naipaul unlocked a whole new way of showing how you can take different kinds of experiences and take them really seriously. You can give them the same weight of meaning.

All that said, what creates narrative motion is friction. There has to be, in the nomenclature of Silicon Valley, a pain point. Is it any wonder that in our effort to use technology for the elimination of friction that we’ve made it harder than ever to grasp a sense a meaning?

Final question: You've drawn this parallel between Silicon Valley’s “frictionless” ideal and our struggle for meaning in modern life. Given everything we've discussed about negative events, friction, and meaning-making - what would you say to someone who's actively trying to optimize away all the “pain points” in their life? Is there a middle ground between accepting necessary friction and being needlessly masochistic?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

For me, it’s not about completely setting aside any attempt to improve. I do think there’s a role for optimization, no doubt. The difference is we need to be more critical of how self-improvement is being sold. The underlying message is that there’s a series of decision you can make to get yourself to some sort of ideal, frictionless state, where you only ever eat healthy foods, never miss a session at the gym, and only have positive, edifying conversations with your spouse. That state doesn’t exist. There’s no set of steps you can take to get there. Friction is intrinsic to human life.

But that isn’t a bad thing. It’s in grappling with the causes of friction in our life—even when that’s something that we’d rather turn away from—that we make our own personal sense of meaning. The dark side may naturally be more powerful than the light side. But overcoming that disadvantage is what makes the light side’s story worth telling​.​​​​​​