Negativity Bias Goes to Eleven

On hostility to anodyne positivity

I made several attempts to generate an inverse version of the famous survivorship bias figure, and while this definitely isn’t that, it does look kind of cool.

As is fairly typical for the last couple of weeks of the academic year, the faculty at Union have been consumed with controversy recently, the details of which don’t really matter. What matters is that this has driven a whole lot of public statements about how Things Have Never Been Worse for the college. This is really not consistent with my personal experience of the last two-and-a-bit decades, so I wrote a long email saying that, and laying out a long list of ways that, in my opinion, the state of the college is actually substantially better than it was when I arrived in the fall of 2001. Again, the details don’t really matter for the purposes of this post.

This, predictably enough, led to a lot of people expressing appreciation for my saying positive things, in private email or face-to-face encounters. One colleague even sent me some chocolate bars as a thank-you. This was generally very heartwarming, but also had a little bit of a sad edge, since a lot of the private comments were of the form “I agree with you, but don’t want to risk saying so on the email list.” A couple of people said things like “Thanks for the positivity, and I’m glad I don’t have to read your inbox…”

The presumption here was that, in the current atmosphere, saying positive things about the state of the college— statements I worked moderately hard to make sure were pretty anodyne— would attract a hostile reaction. This was not a wholly unjustified belief, but in reality, the positive responses far outweighed the negative, and I’m secure enough in my position here that I don’t feel obliged to engage with anything I regard as unreasonable. And, you know, as a veteran of Usenet and the early blogosphere, I have no real fear of academics when it comes to people saying mean things about me in digital media.

As I said, though, this is a bit sad, because it reflects a widespread and justified belief that saying anything positive will get you jumped on. Which is a horrible and toxic place for the campus discourse to have ended up, and that’s probably a bigger problem than any of the material conditions affecting us. I don’t know how we get out of that mode.

This is not, however, a local phenomenon: examples of the general phenomenon abound. Just this morning, I saw this comment on ex-Twitter about negativity bias in parenting, which speaks to a similar issue, and Mark Hannam wrote a long post responding to common complaints about academia in general. This is worst in political contexts, where frankly insane statements about the current state of the world go unchallenged for fear of being piled on, but since everything is now deemed to be political, it’s become incredibly pervasive. And left unchecked, this leads to the absolutely batshit survey results Kevin Drum writes about here, in which the current decade is only narrowly edged out for the decade with “The most war.”

As I said in an ex-Twitter reply to Hannam, I think what we have here is a kind of inverse version of that famous plane-with-red-dots figure illustrating survivorship bias. This is partly a pure sort of anti-survivorship— the folks in academia who are thriving are engaged in their research and teaching and don’t have the time or motivation to be on social media complaining about stuff. But there’s also a significant element of fear of the #discourse— the idea that saying even relatively anodyne positive things about academia, or parenting, or food, or pop culture, or personal finance, or any of a thousand other topics will get attacked for not being sufficiently deferential to those with deeply felt grievances.

That fear is probably overblown in the vast majority of cases, but it’s enough to deter participation through sane and happy people deciding they have better things to do with their time than maybe be yelled at by lunatics. Which just makes things look worse for the next sane and happy person to come along.

This is the one problem we face, both locally and globally, that really does feel like a doom loop to me that I don’t know how to escape. When it comes to public discourse, we have ceded more and more ground to completely unhinged individuals and groups, which is scaring off the boring normies who actually make essentially all of society function. I don’t know how we get out of that, at any level.

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That’s a cheerful start to your Monday… If you would like more of this brand of sunny positivity, here’s a button:

And if you have brilliant suggestions for ways to address this doom loop of negativity bias, the comments will be open: