Negativity Bias

Negativity has been around since human beings have existed and I presume ever since human beings have been able to communicate there has been some sort of negative bias. “Beware of the snakes”, takes greater priority than “yummy, watch out for the tasty berries”. The modern concept and research of negativity bias has been with us for long time but there was a bunch of research in the 1970’s which brought the concept of negative evaluations into the academic spotlight. 2001 proved to be a seminal year with two well-known papers published: one by Baumeister et al. Bad is Stronger than Good outlining the case for bad being more powerful and another by Paul Rozin who has done a bunch of fascinating experiments and studies on things like "negative contagion" such as the question of whether you would wear a pullover from a serial killer. Rozin’s paper in 2001 Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion is a classic and one of the first to explicitly use the term negativity bias (it had been used previously but failed to catch on).