Roy Baumeister || Overcoming the Power of Bad

It's great to have Roy Balmeister on the podcast. Doctor Balmeister is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland and is among the most prolific and most frequently cited psychologists in the world, with over six hundred and fifty publications. His forty books include the New York Times

bestseller Willpower. His research covers self and identity, self regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexual reality and gender aggression, self esteem, meaning consciousness, free will, and self presentation.

In twenty thirteen, he received the William James Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Psychological Science, the Association for Psychological Science's highest honor, and his latest book, co authored with John Tierney, is called the power of bad, how the negativity effect rules us, and how we can rule it. Roy always great to chat with you on the Psychology Podcast. You're a veteran of the show. Glad to be back, Scott.

I always fund to time with you. Indeed, it is quite an honor to talk to one of the most legendary social psychologists on this planet about current issues. You know, I thought we could kind of keep this conversation relevant to the state of the world that we're living in right now and all this scare and let's not beat around the bush. We're seeing a lot of bad in the media these days, that's for sure, and it's always true.

Now they at least have some legitimate things to complain about, you know, most of the time, it's kind of surprising that, you know, life objectively gets better and better and the media keep telling us about you know, we're about to fall off a cliff. So yeah, with this Corona virus scare, a lot of people are falling off a cliff, so

to speak. So there is some reason to to have fears. Yes, yes, well we're not saying there's nothing bad in the world, and there certainly is as right now, what the point of our book was is that the human mind has a natural tendency to overreact to bad things and to overstate how bad they are. So it's quite possible and probably true. I would say that both things are going on. Yes, the coronavirus is bad, and yes it probably sounds worse

than it is. So some of the negative reaction is justified and appropriate, and some of it is probably exaggerated. We don't know for sure, but that would be that would fit the general path. Yeah. Well, let's go back a second to the two thousand and one classic paper Bad is stronger than Good. Just to read some of the abstract bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed

more thoroughly than good. Hardly any exceptions indicating greater power of good can be found. That's incredible, you really it was hard for you to find any exceptions. It was to us too. And you know when I started noticing the pattern, and this is start of the way I work, because I read a lot of stuff and look for things that reminded me of things. I started seeing this pattern that bad was stronger, and I said, well, let's let's do a review, and let's find where it reverses,

because that'll make the theory much more interesting. And I will also explain why bad is stronger, because we could say, well, if bad is stronger and these things and not in those, than something about these explain the power bad rather than those. The problem is we just couldn't find the exceptions, and one place after another we had a bunch of pet theories ourselves. There are four of us on the paper.

We each had our own theory about You're like, well, maybe bad is worse in the past, but the future good would be. You know, you're being more drawn by the future good than the future bad. But no, a future bad thing affects you more than a future good thing. So all our little pet theories were dashed in a way that makes it more exciting because it's such a universal pattern. We somehow stumbled on one of the basic properties of the human mind. But as I said, it

made the theory less less interesting and complex. You know, you'd like to have a fancy idea with lots of well designed exceptions and so on. Sure, wow, well that is pretty dramatic. Now how has that research held up since then? This is now twenty twenty. Yes, well, when I got started writing the book, I said, well, let's I said, well, we'll read all the papers that have cited it. At the time it was just a couple thousand. That's now almost seven thousand papers have cited it. But

pretty much they just say here it is. Again. There are a few people who tried to find exceptions, and I'm always interested in those, but you know, they're pretty feeble and they don't hold up that well. It just seems to extend into one thing after another. So it's rare for paper to be cited that much without some people finding contrary exceptions. There's some interesting recent work sort of trying to address why it might be true beyond the idea that it it just makes evolutionary sense to

watch out for the bad things. First. You know Uncle Bach and his group, which shown in many things. You know, hitting the middle is good. So there's one way to be good. To be you can just have the right amount. In two ways to be bad, you can have too much or not enough. So too much and not enough those would be qualitatively different and might explain, you know, some other greater power of bead or something like that.

So that's an interesting extension of it. But again, nobody's come along to say there contrary findings or other patterns. That's super interesting. Yeah, the the negative, you know, it's it seems like if it's not enough, it seems like that's more relative than too much. There's some things I feel like are kind of objectively bad regardless of our position to others, you know, like an appending sort of death,

like a cancer diagnosed something. But but the not enough, you know, people could be like, oh, I don't have enough money and that's really bad, but that's usually like relative to others. Is there any is there any? Is there any truth to what I'm saying? Yeah, I guess having well, too much money isn't usually a problem that people can play about, right, That's right. I like that, and it's on my own research and personality traits self control, that doesn't seem to be a problem with having too

much or intelligence having too much. So a lot of things, you know, more is just better. But I'm looking outside. Look at the temperature. You know, the temperature can be just right, which is sort of in fair and hights somewhere between fifty and ninety. And then there's two cold, which is one kind of problem, and too hot, which is another kind of problem. And those problems manifest themselves

in different ways, and you have to deal with them differently. Obviously, you put on more clothes and it's too cold, and take them off and it's too hot. So so yeah, there are many things when being at the appropriate level is the best, and too much or not enough are both bad, but in different ways. You know, brought a question of how is it held up? It held them surprisingly well. Yeah, it's it's the second most cited paper

on my lead. Even I was related to nothing else other than this, this book coming out, and most most people, their most cited papers are the culmination of years of research and of many papers. You got. You got a way easy with that one, really, yeah we did. Yeah, it was just stumbles on a chair. Well, your other one has held up. I assume you're most cited. Is the need for Belonging paper? Is that right? I'm guessing yes, yes, yeah,

and that one's held up pretty well too. No. No, it's not like the replication crisis came out and they're like, well, the people's need for belonging didn't replicate. Turns out, turns out. People don't really give a beep about that. You know, Hi, everyone, just wanted to take a quick break and talk about my new book that's coming out April seventh. It's called Transcend The New Science of Self Actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all. It represents the culmination

of many, many years of hard work and synthesis. What I've what I've done in this book is I've taken Maslow's classic hierarchy of Needs and I've revised it for the twenty first century, trying to bring back humanistic psychology. I think that the field of humanistic psychology in the fifties and sixties really got a lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans, as well as the

humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. I really hope in this book can present a vision of humanity that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with each other, but also help us reach our greatest potential individually and collectively. So if you want to check out this book, you can actually pre order it right now in Amazon as well as other there's independent bookstores. I think you can pre order it from and then on April seventh, starting April seventh,

that should be in bookstores. A lot of people in wondering throughout the years how they can support me and the Psychology podcast, And here here's the time. You know, you're always welcome to contribute money to the podcast, help support it. If you're a longtime listener or even short time listener, you want to not only support the podcast but dive deeper into a lot of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on this show. This is a great way to do that by buying this book.

So please check the book out and let me know what you think. So you're you're doing pretty well in this replication crisis, except for perhaps someone could say the the you know, the the self control Uh what what is the theory called? With the yeah, you go to except sometimes it doesn't replicate. So that's something where are about probably some boundary conditions. But I don't see how any honest scientists can read the literature and say there's

no effect. There is clearly an effect with six hundred significant findings, and not in the opposite direction. What are some of the criticisms on the self control thing? That's been a very successful theory and so it invites attacks. They're one line of argument saying that it's not a limited resource, that there are other sorts of things, change and motivation, subjective beliefs. I think all of those have something to contribute, But in terms of replacing the theory,

they don't. But you know, there's still questioning the theory. That's fair game. And there are some things we don't understand and how the bind body part of it in our lap. Giving people a dose of glucose, which is the body's energy supply, that whites out all the manipulations as it should, if you know, if being depleted of your willpower means that your body doesn't have enough energy to uh to spare something for for further acts of self control. But other people, you know, question that and

don't find that. So so I am arguing about what is the causal mechanism the process, And then there's some saying that there's no such effect because they don't replicate it in their lab. Obviously, the two kind, the two explanent, the two criticisms contradict each other, so one of them at least has to be completely false. R You can't

have a ballet alternative explanation if there's no phenomenon. If my take on it, thank you, that that there's no such thing as is absurd given the way to the evidence. The one exception would be if you decide you're not going to believe anything social psychologists have done, and I think it people are hoping for that. There's some people trying to make their careers by tearing everything down. So

I mean that's in a way fair. I mean, if it were to be established that there's no such thing as ego depletion, I would have trouble believing anything in social psychology. We've found it over and over again for twenty years, and many different contexts and people replicated the finding again all over the world and different laboratories. Many people I never met or heard of have found the

same effect. So if all of that can be mistaken, then yeah, there's something so fundamentally wrong with the way we do research that I would say abandoned social psychology entirely. But I don't believe. But to argue about what is the process and mechanism and what are the border conditions, I mean that remains a lively and open thing. And over the twenty years I've revised the theory multiple times, has no day to come in. That's I think what you should do. I never assume I get it right

the first time. To do it, follow all the criticisms, and sometimes people say and say, oh, they've got a very good point, and they change my thinking because of that. Initially we thought it was that the brain is running out of fuel and somehow it was using a fuel. That was a plausible first first thought about it. But I've been convinced to the extent it's tied to say

that the glucose, which is your body's energy. Modern people aren't running out of that, So it's it's it's allocation, you know, does the brain decide I'm going to keep putting energy into this endeavor or not. That's that's a different kind of decision that oh, I don't have enough energy. Now, maybe that we evolved under conditions when conserving all your

energy was really important. Your immune system, for example, again coming back to I guess the immune system doesn't really help against the coronavirus because we don't have any immunity to it. But system responds to infections by fighting them and trying to get you healthy again, and that uses a lot of glucose, but it just uses it once

in a while. I went this from Susan Siggers from and so, you know, back in the olden days before they were antibiotics or any sort of medicine and so on, if you've got an infected cut on your foot, it could possibly kill you. You needed to conserve all the energy you could for crises like that. Not to mention it might be hard to find something to eat tomorrow. You might have a bad day and the hunt doesn't

work and you sometimes go hungry. So we evolved under conditions where it was a lot more necessary to conserve energy. Hence self control is a more modern development, least modern and evolution. That's an expensive use on it. And maybe when the brain things I've expended a lot of energy, maybe I need to cut back now and conserve energy, feed the other organs, preserve it for the immune system and so on. So I'm just bringing this up as a as an illustration of revising that that theory, and

I expect that to continue. I don't think we've got it perfect yet, but there's clearly something there. And you mentioned the replication thing in social psychology in general, A couple of colleagues. We are trying to go through all these because the education got publicity because they did it first, but now it's become familiar. They're failing to replicate one thing after another. I was prompted to do this review.

I was at a conference a couple of months ago and they said they had just done a big one on terror management theory and that had not worked either. And I thought, well, I don't I don't even really like terror management theory. But I've replicated their findings and you know, a dozen or two times there's clearly something there. So there's something wrong with the way we're doing these

multi lab application things. You know, for one, if you fail to manipulate the independent variable, it's not a test of the hypothesis. If you want to say anxiety causes risk avoidance, when you're testing that theory, if you fail to manipulate anxiety, then even if you don't get an effect on risk avoidance, that doesn't mean anything's wrong with the theory, right because you haven't supplied a test. There's no way your data can say anything about weather anxiety

causes risk invoidance. If you fail to create the difference between a higher group and a low anxiety group. You can't learn anything about what effect anxiety has on risk taking. So and that the first study on ego depletion that didn't work. They didn't manipulate it. And I've looked into

a number of these other things. The Boston Schooler manipulating beliefs in free will to see if people who were led to disbelieve in free will would cheat and steal more, which they showed, and they had a manipulation that it worked, but they had a very motivated population. And then other people tried different populations around as motivated and they don't get it, and they don't care and they don't respond

to it. It was one in one of the failures in the many Labs replication thing that reported that they didn't get that effect. But I tried to look up did they manipulate the independent variable. It was very hard to find because that was not prominent, and you had to look in all the obscure online supplementary materials and finally looked there and then know they failed to manipulate

the belief in free will. Well, then again, you're not drawing any conclusion about the effect of belief on free will on whether people will achieve and steal because you haven't manipulated the the pane variable. So that's that's one possibility for why these things aren't working, and I suspect that's true with the terror management and lots of the others. I mean, there are dozens now and mostly the record is pretty dismal. No why that is, I don't know.

I know people like to imagine you can just bring someone to the laboratory, or actually they want to run these on computers that you just put the instructions there and people will read them and follow them. But you know, people doing these online studies aren't nearly as involved in them, and sometimes they're watching television or eating or drinking or whatever, so their responses are not as motivated. One of my manners, Joel Cooper, was here on sabbatical. He's not in the seventies,

and his life's work was on cognitive dissonance. To again, something that's replicated hundreds of times, although lots of people don't get it. He says, Yeah, I'm just wait till they come after me with one of these big online things. He says that they will never work on an online thing.

He says, you know, it's so important in dissonance. You get the person there and make eye contact and engage them and get them to care about what's going on in the study, and then they care about what's happening, and then their responses reflect that. And he said, you know, the way they do these studies, that will never work either, and you know that's one of the foundational theories and in social psychology. And he's calling it before before, before

it even happens together. They're trying, and I will see how it turns out, but that might be a factor too, you know, getting people involved in getting them to care. Mike, Mike, I regret about the way they're doing These replications are one. Okay, it's interesting to say, well, they got it and I don't at it. But instead of saying, well, then we have to figure out why it happens here and why

it doesn't happen here. That's the right scientific approach. But your findings are all wrong, you know, and ones that don't get it say, you guys must be faking your data or doing something tricky or analyzing the data in tricky ways or whatever. And then and then meanwhile, the ones who get it. They're saying about the other as well, you're just doing it wrong, getting people properly involved, and so both yelling at each other. You know, we should try to do studies that you replicate it in one

condition and not another. That will teach us what the conditions are. Oh, I think you're absolutely right. I think that's really the true spirit. If we're all good faith actors in this game, then that's the right spirit to have. Part of the problem. That's what some of the impetus was the Didrik Stoppel and a couple others who were found to be faking data, and and that sort of

raised the specter of how widespread is this. My assumption's most social scientists are honest and decent people and really doing their best to find out the truth. And then some of them are sort of politically motivated trying to advance the social justice causes that they want to live. More suspicion of them scientifically, But nobody's out there just the way Stopple is was deliberately faking data so as

to advance their careers. Well, I won't say nobody. There are clearly a few doing that, but I think that's the strong minority. In particular, when I find something that multiple lads has found and I start to think, well that that has to be something really there. There's only one person who gets it and nobody else does. Yeah, then I'm suspicious. And as you know, I'm a literature reviewer. I'm doing more of that as I get older, think about the big issues, and read lots of different literatures.

So it's kind of how I operate. If it's found in multiple places by unrelated labs, there's got to be something there. And and if other people don't get it, well there has to be some something explaining the different I haven't believed causality and science. There's almost like a social status boost you get to show, look, I didn't replicate something that that has a very well known finding.

You know, there's sort of this this this tendency to feel the sense of glee almost that look, I you know, there's a thrill to not replicating something that has replicated, you know, and is in this in terms, I'm taking down the intro site textbooks, you know, And so I didn't you know what I'm saying. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah? I know that. Yeah, I mean when I was a graduate school. If we couldn't replicate something, well, you said it was our fault. You know, I must

be doing it wrong. But now a new thing is no, if I don't reputate it, it's somebody else's fault. Right, Yeah, but neither of those is entirely healthy. If some people get it and I don't, well there must be something we're doing differently. And assumption that somebody is faking or pe hacking or any of that stuff that I think that should not be the primary assumption. Yeah. Well, I really do like the spirit upon which we try to

figure out. You know, we're all in this together, right, Let's try to figure out why are we getting this and you're not getting this? And maybe even joined forces. So you said the journals seem to have favor failures to replicate. It's so economics paper a couple of years ago that before the whole replication industry got established, that if you repeat somebody's experiment and you find the same thing, the journal editors don't want to publish that. Figure, Well,

what do we care about this? We already know this, This is not news. But if you repeat somebody experiment and don't get it, in the journal said it says, oh, wow, that's interesting. So you're actually better off failing to replicate and in terms of being able to publish your work in a prominent place, and that's dangerous insteadive, and I think they're taking steps to correct for that. Now with some of these replications, you register them in advance and

they'll publish them however they turn out. So that's that's that's healthy roy in an ironic sort of or metas sort of way. How does what we're talking about right now relate to the larger topic of this conversation today, which is that the bad is stronger than the good? Does this apply it all to scientific Yes, you see what I did. Yeah, inicial fighting is good, but it's more of an exciting scandal if other people fail to

replicate it. So the bad thing gets uh, gets publicity, and then and then you know the way the media have a bias toward negative things, So to publicize the bad news and then after a while other people find it, but that doesn't get as much publicity. So you mentioned that original replication study on ecotopatient by Hagar and so got lots of media coverage. Say, oh, look it didn't work.

Something's wrong with the theory. And then and then this guy Dang when he published the data a couple of years later, the original data, he went and analyzed it and he said, well, the manipulation check didn't work. And to the extent the manipulation check worked, it was significant so that they did replicate it, but that didn't get reported.

And then he also published I think he ran a multi site replication around the world and now a significant and he said, yeah, I worked there too, But again, none of that gets nearly as much tension. So the media like that, and that's true unfortunately for people and their reputations as well. It's been well known for a long time that some band who's comes out will destroy your reputation, and then exonerating information comes out later, and the media might report that too, but it's hidden away

and doesn't get nearly the reaction. So it's really hard for someone, especially falsely accused people. It's really hard for them to rebuild their reputation or recover their status because the band gets so much more publicity than the good. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously potential negative implications of that for early career researchers who might be scared of taking any sort of risk whatsoever in their research or the topics that they investigate out of fear of reputation damage as

opposed to the explorer. I'm hearing that a lot. I'm really cut back, you know, I'm getting older and feigning graduate students to the big part of my career up until now, I'm kind of phasing out doing that. But from the ones I hear who are actively doing that, from our younger colleagues who were still training, they said they're more and more scared of publishing something that might turn out to be wrong. And then it takes away

much of the discovery. I mean, it assumes before you do an experiment, you know exactly how it's going to turn out, so you can't learn from your data that my generation, or talk to our colleagues that we would run a study with an idea and then it would turn out differently than we thought, and then we'd think about that and try to figure out and then they'd run another study to act and then you know, after three or four or five, and then you start to

zero in on what's really going on. But if you had to be right, in the first place and didn't re analyze your data or try something different or you really learn from your mistakes, the whole discovery process would be short circuited. Also, being scared takes the fun out of it. A lot of people I know are saying social psychology is just not fun to do anymore, what as it really was for a long time, partly because

of this discovery. Like I said, I never assume I know what's right when I get started, and so for me it's a process of trying this and listening to the data and analyzing and really trying to figure out there and doing more and building on that. So a lot of my best work has come about that way. But the young people won't get to do that if they're scared of of being wrong. I was maybe scared

of being boring. I never wanted to be boring. Yeah, well that's I think you could say you successfully never became boring. Our mutual friend, Marty Selgman I said that there are two kinds of scientists, never be wrong or never boring. I try not to be wrong, but I hate to be boring. I'm willing to check a few chances. Well, Mary, Marty was successful in that regard as well, both of you him or successful, and I hope, I hope I can be successful in saying that too someday. So far, well,

thank you, thank you. We don't need to view these as mutu exclusive categories, right, like you can be interesting and do interesting topics and do good science as well, you know you don't. Maybe we can give a message to early career researchers to take some risks and but just do it do it well, you know, I mean,

do the risks. Do the science well, but take the risks. Yeah. Yeah, that's another idea that there's one method that should one sort of methods that should be used all the time, and that you have to preregister everything and know it well, we kind of leave a little more rope for exploring. We're going to really shut down a lot of the creativity and in the field, and we should adjust the methodological standards to the topics so we can study everything.

My take is going to use the best available method and not the only method. I remember, like way back in the seventies when they did that first study comparing you know, studying people who were in the hospital had been seriously injured. Well that was in the Social psych Journal, which at the time mainly had laboratory and studies on undergraduates, and there was a very different method, and you know,

it wasn't quite as strong. I lacked some of the metological strengths of a laboratory experiment with under grants, but it was such important information about how people coped with serious long term injuries and disability. Ken you've got to relax the standard study everything with the best method available at the time, and that's how the field advances to say, no, you can't do anything unless you have one hundred people per condition. Well, that's just ruling out large swaths of

things that we ought to be studying. Yeah. Well, I think we're on the same page with that. So, you know, returning to the overall theme, because I didn't necessarily expect us to go in that whole topic, you know, down that whole route, but I'm glad we did. I think it'll be beneficial to people listening. But talking, you know, recentering here for a second, why are we wired for bad?

I mean, do you do you fundamentally think that from a brain wiring perspective, where we evolved a kind of a brain neuromachinery to make us focus more on the bad than the good. Yes, that is very much what I think. And we came around to this early in the process with the line that's in the power of band talking. So that life has to win every day. Death only has to win once. Avoiding something that's going

to kill you has to get priority. You know, people did take risks, you do things that are promote survival reproduction at some or they can trade those off. I'm thinking of people who have sex with somebody that not supposed to and somebody else might come around to kill them, which happened in most societies in the history of the world, going back into prehistory. But for the most part, Yeah,

to survive into advances, that has to get priority. I mean learning what to eat and how to eat food, how to prepare different kinds of complex foods, and that took trial and error, and you know a mistake could kill you, so naturally you want to be cautious on there. You know, a mushroom might look good, but the chance that it's poisonous and all bringston death should discourage experimentation

along those lines. Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense evolutionarily, but even you know, as you well know, a lot of things that evolved to be adaptive aren't necessarily productive or constructive. In the day and age, you know, we can kind of overshoot the target in a lot of ways. How is the Polayanna principle of potential natural weapon we can use against the bad? So principle is just to look for the good side and put positive

spin on things and make the best of it. Well, yes, I think that's a useful attitude to cultivate someone, not to be blind to bad things, but to notice the positive and attend to it. There really is a lot more good we are. Book is called The Power of Bad and it says bad things have stronger effect than good things. But nevertheless, it's a positive, upbeat book. You know, life is basically good, and it has gotten better in almost every respect over the centuries. So we've failed to

appreciate how much better off we are. Do a fair amount of reading of history and other cultures and stuff like that, and sometimes sort of remark to myself, anyone born in the United States or Western Europe after World War two should never complain about anything compared to you know, what most people have had to endure and suffer through.

I can to consider that the poor people in the United States, the bottom ten percent, they live in so many ways better than the kings and queens of medieval Europe. Have much better entertainment, they have more safer sex partners, they have better food. I mean the kings of France

and Spain. You know, back in the thirteen hundreds or whatever, could couldn't get fresh food all that often, couldn't ride in a car, certainly couldn't fly in a plane that didn't have cable television people to play music for them, but again not nearly the mountain diversity of music that's available. If you had a toothache, you just had it. You were just going to have to wait it out and

a couple months of pain. I think there's a line by Dan Franklin, so it was just a couple of centuries ago saying, oh, if humanity could only solve the toothache, everybody would live in bliss forever after. Let's say that's a useful perspective because you must you know, if you've had a toothache, and hardly any of us have had a lasting toothache, but remember the worst pain you had at the dentist and imagine just having that around the clock for a month. That's the way a lot of

people lived. And we've solved that problem. You know, people just don't know what that's even like hardly anymore. And yet we don't appreciate how great that is, No, we don't. I think the positive thing about the pollyannas you recognize the bad things so sure they have to be dealt with, but also attend to the good and refocus on them and appreciate how much positive stuff there is there is

in life. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I think that for some listeners that might feel a cold comfort though, if they're get hit with this virus, you know, if you're you know individually, you know, kind of putting this in context and thinking about this in the in the history of humanity. I mean, I mean, there is one way we can kind of take a more bird's eye view of this and say, it's better to have the virus now than the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. You know,

there's We're in a lot better shape now. If I had to choose between getting the nineteen eighteen flu or this virus right in twenty twenty. I it's good to be in too. It's good to be in twenty twenty. So you know what sort of positive spin can we at all? It's better both the time and the virus is not as bad I think the Yeah, the death total is not nearly I mean that that that epidemic killed more people than World War One. Yeah, I'm just trying to see it for our listeners, you know, completely

freaking out over this situation. You know what words of wisdom can you can you can you give them based on your lifetime of research? Well, I mean if you get it. The thing is most people get it won't even know it. We have most people that know symptoms, and then most people who have symptoms it's not all

that bad. They say, it's it's like having the flu. Uh. So you know, it's unfortunate and it will kill a few people, which is which is tragic, But for most of us, the impact is not nearly as bad as as it would have been at another time where we have communication coordinating responses at least at the country level and somewhat at the international level. So I think they're handling it reasonably all. And you know, there's no way to prevent things like this all together. But a lot

of good stuff in life. If you get the virus, okay, maybe you'll be sick for a week, but then I would go back to normal, and it's the life is pretty good. So yeah, it's not to not to make light of negative things, but to just put them in context and appreciate the others. I think, getting back to our book, but the more important thing is not just not just your attitude, but you know, putting this actively

to work in your own life. So, yes, there are bad things, but you can do good things and pursue good things to do it. And so we want to keep in mind the rule of fore and it's not just that one good thing is needed to overcome one bad thing, but rather four things but about the same level of magnitude will compensate for it and possibly put you into the positive. So in relationships, you know you do something bad annoy as your partner or whatever, well

that's going to happen. Don't just think, well, I should do something nice for him or her to make up for it. We've got to do four nice things to get the relationship back on a positive track. If you keep that in mind, that that's the formula. That's why life is good. Is that a lot of little good

things outweigh a few big, strong, bad things. Yeah, you say, plan on at least four compliments to make up for one bit of criticism if you want to keep your business a full aim for at least four satisfied customers, very unsatisfied one. That's a very proactive message that offers hope and kind of a corrective to how do I

want to frame this? In a way, it's it's kind of a strategy for resiliency in life as well, because you could see how the human mind could be designed to panic at one bad thing and say, well, there's no way we'll ever get out of this. But instead it kind of shifts to a more productive, constructive approach where you say, okay, well now we just have to work really hard to kind of get four more good things going on here to kind of outweigh it. You

know what I mean, Yes, absolutely right. There's no way to prevent all bad things from happening. All lives have bad things in them, and we have to recognize those and live with those. It's just cultivate a lot of good things. I worried one When we published this, positive psychology was just taking off, and I have had a lot of sympathy with the movement and friends there, and I worried, well, like, well, they not like me because

I'm saying bad is stronger than good. But what I tried to highlight for them is it's all the more need for positive psychology because you need to teach people how to cultivate more good things, because life is good and good wins by force of numbers, So we need to generate a lot of good to overcome the occasional band. I love that. I'll here's the question for you, really, why are hell fearing religions historically more popular than one's

preaching a benevolent message. Yes, well, I'm not as an expert on that, and we cover that in the book. My co author, my friend down Tiarney, he had more expertise in those, but it seems to be there's a perennial appetite in what people want religion for is to recognize the negative side and recognize the power of evil in the world, and to gloss it over and make religion a kind of self esteem boosting, self help thing.

You know, they drift that way that's sort of comfortable and seems to fit modern life, but it doesn't really resonate with people's spiritual needs. To be sure, I think one impetus to religiosity is to cope with bad things. I've noticed myself, and I think their general data showing the same thing, that people turn to religion when life gets hard. Indeed, when I was doing the research for my book on how People Find Meaning in Life, I

read a lot of there's a chapter on religion. I read a lot of history and sociology of religion, and I kind of came away with the impression that the decline in religion in the modern world is because life is too good, and that if you know, really awful things happen, you'd see people turning back to it religion. You know, I've known people personally who, after a tremendous personal setback whatever, would start attending a church again and

becoming more religious. And so it's part of the value and power of religion to give people a conceptual and emotional framework for dealing with bad things. So religions that acknowledge both hell and heaven see at least to inspire a lot more passionate participation by their members and the sort of wider down protonism that doesn't really believe in hell,

that sort of thing absolutely. You know. Gordon Alport used to write a lot about the psychology of religion, and he did have this distinction between like more deprivation focused religion, which you have the religion to you avoid or to avoid punishment. You know, it seems more deprivation based versus growth based religion, which is moving toward goodness, moving toward love. And I always thought that was a really interesting distinction.

He talked about different flavors of religion, and I always I always really resonated with his work, and it seems relevant to this conversation. I don't remember that from all part the deficit and growth thing we associated with Maso and his Oh for sure, I'm putting it within Maslow's terminology. Yeah. He would have been a contemporary of Gordon Floyd. Floyd was older. Yeah, they they had some interesting changes. I actually have seen some private correspondences between Maslow and Outport,

which was cool. So Gordon Outport called it mature religion versus you know, like less mature religion. But I'm putting it within Maslow's framework, so that I was very keen of you to pick up on that. That was very keen of you. Yeah, mas A Outport really you know, talked about, you know, what would a mature religion look like?

And yeah, it seems like what he was talking about was more of this kind of growth oriented form of religion where it's more open minded and open to the inconsistencies of the religion and as opposed to immature religion he talked about as being more self serving and representing negative stereotypes that people have about religion in general. So, I don't know, I just made that link on the spot.

It's not like I had prepared my notes that I was going to bring up Gordon Alport, but it seems relevant to this conversation easing ideas from a time self actualization was central and ma as wells thinking, Yeah, and so religions, some of them do promote a form of that, you know, the meditation and so on. It's not so much trying to cope with negative things in the world as to transform the mind and the self in a

positive manner. But again, what often people brings people in the door in the first place, into churches is negative aspects of life. The great the great teologies, the religion Buddhism and Christianity and Judaism, so they tend to have their common view that life is suffering. So they were ways for people to deal with the negative aspect of life.

Is basically a down or philosophy trying to say that, well, life is suffering, but you can get off the cycle of rebirth by meditating, or you can get reincarnated in heaven and live happily forever after, you know, if you do these things. So there are ways of coping that they're starting with life is suffering as the premise, and that's just not something we believe anymore, and with reason

we don't. We don't have two days we talk. Well, imagine starring a religion whose premise was life is good. You don't need God, you don't need anyone but yourself because you got all the goodness within you. That'd be an interesting religion. Lots of people have that approach. They don't call it a religion, but that is sort of one widespread view right now that elevates the self to supreme value, and it goes with a non religious approach.

I think it's it's risky, and I'm finishing at my next book on the self and sort of revisiting the idea of making the self one of the basic values to pursue to guide your life. That's that's consistent with individualism and much of the way we think about people in the modern world. But it's risky because obviously the self dies when you die, so your life, your life meeting,

ends when it ends. That and people have generally dropped positive meaning in their life from things that will outlive them, that will last longer, like religion which has an eternal time frame, or political movements that are going to create a better society in the future. At the individual level, people often do it, you know, for their children and

grandchildren and drum meaning from that. The more you replace that sort of future oriented time frame with study, studying and glorifying the self and learning about the self and building the self, well, what's that doesn't have any lasting value after your dad, although some of them imagine that it does. Well, that's very a very interesting view of the situation. I guess I'm thinking of, you know, how can we live our life where we don't appeal to

to a god necessarily to keep us on track. But we do have faith that stemming from our own potentialities, we can transcend ourselves, you know, by doing good, by having purpose. So I guess it is by getting out we can get outside ourselves. But we don't necessarily have to connect with a higher supernatural being in order to get outside of ourselves. Right, A lot of things come down with being nice to others and helping society and

so on. Those thing could be fairly universal values if you subject that approach to a rigorous philosophical questioning, I'm not sure it really holds up all their well, because well, what's the purpose of your life? Is to help other lives? Okay, but what's the purpose of their lives? Well, that's to help other people. Yet it's sort of like passing the bucks existent everybody's life draws value from everybody else's life. Well is that? Is that just some kind of Ponzi scheme? Uh? Well,

so what do you think? That might be a bit a cynical way to be human altruism? But what so? Then what do you what do you think is the best route of the good life? Then have you figured that out? Oh? Well, uh, I don't know that I'm quite out there yet I have to be the next

book after this one. I'm just kidding. But it's clear, not clear, but it looks like pursuing happiness in the sense of immediate good feelings only works for a while, and that wears off some that it's clear that when we do live to benefit others, that tends to be pretty satisfying, not perhaps in an existential sense that it creates more meaning. But that's sort of bio logically the way we evolved to care not just about our individual selves but about the group, and so we get satisfaction

for it. Go back to the eighties, social psychologists debated how much. Philosophers and also have debated I think in the seventies, you know, is altruism really possible or are people just making themselves feel good? You know, you feel bad and then you do a good deed and then you feel better. Well, is that just to sign you're really being selfish after all? Or are you're really doing a good deed and then having to get a reward

for it. But my take on it is we should just be pleased that the human psyche evolved that way that we get pleasure and satisfaction out of doing things for others, so that these questions that go on unresolved forever. It's usually that the question is wrongly phrased. Oh that's really interesting. You know, there's hope here, right. You offer ways that we can see the bigger picture, that we can and really move towards a more realistic, unbalanced view

of life. You talk about the negative golden rule, what is that really? But if the golden rule of courses do unto others as you have them do unto you. But given the power of bad and bad things are stronger than good, the more important rule is don't do to others things that you don't want them to do to you. So it's just emphasizing the negative version of it, but that's much that's much more important. Oh yeah, i'm black.

If people did this or that for me, Okay, well yeah, it's nice for you to do that to other people too, But first and foremost focus on reducing the harm and doing the negative. So don't do things to others that you would really don't want to have done to you. And that's a good way to live on live one's life. Yeah, y yes, yes, way to construct relationships and deal with social environment and everything else. I mean, it's just a variation on the classic Golden rule advice, but it recognizes

the greater power of bad good. I like that. Okay, keep giving me things to live the little bad diet, as you call it. How do I get on that diet? I want to get starting to right now. I want to get on that diet. All right, Well, I think we had five suggestions for the low bad diet. First of all, it doesn't have to be perfect. Perfectionists tend

to be dissatisfied and unhappy, often neurotic. Indeed, for the book I was writing, I've been going through a lot of things about mental illness, and you'd be surprised at how many psychological disorders have perfectionism. We might not be surprised, but many people would be. How many how many psychological disorders have element of perfectionism in there? Forget about being perfect, just concentrate on being good enough. Eliminate the negative that will get you far, and then you know, we can

slowly seek improvement. But the important thing is to get to where you're good enough. Second, bad things are going to happen, but focus on the big picture. Uh, you know, calamatizing the bad, overstating it, or again you know, this is the end of the world. Yeah. And the classic thing is that the teenager who breaks up with his or her girlfriend, her boyfriend and says, oh, I'm never gonna no one will ever love me again, I'll never

be happy again. I might as well kill myself. Well, come on, there are plenty of other things to live for, and there are plenty of other people. My research on broken hearts show that people feel a real bad when they when their heart is broken, and then they find somebody else and then they're happy. It works reliably well, so there's a lot of good in the world. As I said, don't get carried away with the bad. No. A bit of advice was to use this with the

media too. He's recognized the media and it's their business model. I'm not attributing nefarious motives to them, but the media tend to exaggerate negative things and focus on negative things, and that's what what sells newspapers or gets clicks or whatever.

Journey my co author was a journalist and he said very early in his career he started wondering, why does everything have to be a crisis One of his first assignments was writing something about local weather pattern and you know, under the influence of the editor, he was starting to build it into this crisis. Wait a minute, you know, it's just some weather. It's not not a crisis. But you recognize that the media doing this and then compensate,

so you actively look for some positive media stories. You can sign up to a cartoon service to be email a cartoon every day, or or whatever it is. When you're reading something negative, deliberately look for positive stuff in the media. Both make some time for nostalgia, think back on the good things in your life. I mean, a lot of us tend to automatically remember things we did wrong, things we regret or whatever. But you know that sort

of gives you a negative view of the past. Indeed, a paper about to be published on people spontaneous thoughts and thoughts about the past are the most negative. You know, not all of them, but on average, you know, the present is pretty pleasant. The future is mixed. A lot of good in the future, but negative thoughts about the past, often involuntary ones, ruminating and sort of remembering bad things, but just make an effort to remember positive, happy things.

My Buddy Constantine said, Akitas, there's this great line of research on nostalgia, and he said, we started doing it. Nostalgia was assumed to be a sign of mental illness or neurosis or something like that. You tell his colleagues, Oh, I'm remembering the happy time I had there, and they said, oh, what's wrong. Are you feeling depressed? Or you've said no,

I'm feeling good. And it's a reason. One of the reasons old people are in general happier than young people is they do bring back things from the past and enjoy, enjoy those positive memories, and last remind yourself that, yeah, overall, things that are getting better right at the moment, got this virus spreading around the world, and so yes, some things are getting worse. Economic downturn going to be a

consequence of this and other problems. But mostly life is much better than it was fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago. The long term trend is very much upward. And what we were saying earlier, people adjust so rapidly and they forget about things, and you know, you used to just suffer and suffer from toothaches, and now we don't do those. We don't have toothaches anymore.

But instead of appreciating how great we have it, our living in bliss wherever after, like Ben Franklin suggested, you know, we just forget about it and worry about other positive things in the future. So yeah, again, look at the big picture and the overall positive trends in individual lives as well as society and collectively. That's just constantly new and better things happening. This is great stuff, Roy, and I hope it helps our listeners get through this tough time.

And a lot of what's tough about it is the uncertainty of the matter, not necessarily the reality of the matter. So maybe putting things a little bit more in context and focusing or bringing more, you know, four good things in the day for every one news story they hear might actually help them good. I help so too. Thanks Roy, it's always such a great time chatting with you. Oh Jay, sat My, Grise, thank you. I hope it's a good podcast.

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