Getting Stuck in Negative Thinking and How to Get Unstuck

Gosh, I wish I could dance but I can't. And you really mind doing that.

So instead I thought I'd like to talk a little bit today about how people think. I am very passionate about this question.

I am a social psychologist, which basically means that I am a professional observer of people.

So that's what I do; I'm trying to figure out how humans think and how we can be able to think better.

Here's something I noticed a few years ago about how my thinking looks; here is a normal week in my life, which usually seems to revolve around the publication of research papers.

So, I'm here, at the maximum of my artistic abilities as a stick I walk along the baseline, If a research paper is accepted.

And this rush happens to me, this flash of happiness and then I go back to the baseline with the food date. (Laughter)

A few days later, a research paper may be rejected, and this thing gives me a very horrible feeling.

And I wait for this passing moment to finish but somehow I can't stop thinking about it.

Here's the craziest part: even if another paper is accepted the next day, well, that's nice, but somehow I cannot get out of my mind this annoying rejection.

And so, what happens here? Why failure seems to hang on our minds much longer than success?

Together with my colleague Amber Boysten in the Department of Political Science, I started thinking about this question.

This question, "Do you hang our minds in negatives?" We all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things.

The same cup, the proverb says, can be seen as half full and half empty. There are many researches in the social sciences showing that relying on how you describe the cup to people.

Half full or half empty changes in how they feel about it.

So, if you describe the cup as half full, this is called the gain frame, because you focus on what has been gained, And then people like it.

However, if you describe the same cup as half empty, the loss frame, then people will not like.

But we wonder what happens when we try to move on to thinking about this one way to think about it in another.

Can humans move back and forth? Or, are they pinning one way to think about it? Does one of these signs, in other words, tend to be more attached to the mind?

Well, to investigate this issue, we conducted a simple experiment. We told the participants about this new surgery.

We randomly assigned them to one of two cases. For the participants of the first case, the first group, we describe the surgery in terms of gains.

We said it has a 70% success rate.

For participants in the second group, We filmed the process in terms of losses.

We said the failure rate is 30%.

So, it's the same process, we just focus people's attention on the part of the cup that is full, or the other empty part.

It's probably not surprising that people liked the process when it was described that it has a 70% success rate, And they did not tend to her when described as having a 30% failure rate.

But then we added a turning point: The participants told us the first group, "You know, you can think of this as a 30% failure rate."

Now they no longer like her.

The participants told us the second group, "You know, you can think of this as a 70% success rate."

But unlike the first group, they commented on their first opinion. They seemed to be stuck in the initial loss framework they saw at the beginning of the study.

We conducted another test. This time the participants told us for the current governor for an important mandate who ran for re-election against his rival.

And again, we had two groups of participants. We described to them as the current ruler's record in one of two ways.

We said that when the current ruler took over, it was expected that the state budget cuts would affect about 10,000 jobs.

And then half of the participants read that it is under the leadership of the current ruler 40% of these jobs were saved.

They admired the current ruler. They thought he was doing a great job.

The rest of the participants read that under the leadership of the current ruler, 60% of these jobs were lost.

Thus, they did not like the current ruler; they think he is doing a terrible job.

But then again, we added a turning point. For Group I participants, we reformulated the information in terms of losses.

Now they no longer like the current ruler anymore.

For participants in the second group, we reformulated the information on the side of the gains, just like the first study… this did not seem to matter.

People in this group still don't like the current ruler.

So, notice what this means. Once it enters the loss frame there it hangs.

Humans cannot come back to think about the jobs that have been saved once they imagine the jobs lost.

So, in both of these scenarios actually, the current ruler will be excluded for the benefit of his rival.

At this point we are curious: why is this happening?

Is it actually possible that people are mentally harder on them to turn from losses to gains; to move from gains to losses?

So, we conducted the third study to test how people can easily switch from one frame to another.

This time the participants told us, "Imagine that there is an outbreak of a rare disease…the lives of 600 people are at risk."

We asked the participants in one group, "If 100 lives are saved, how many people will lose their lives?"

We asked the other group of participants, "If you lose a hundred lives, how many more will be saved?"

So, everyone has to count 600, subtract 100, and come up with the answer of 500.

But while people in the first group have to shift from gains to losses in order to do that, people in the second group should move from losses to gains.

We calculated how long it would take to solve that simple mathematical problem And what we found was that when people had to shift from gains to losses they could resolve the issue very quickly; this took them 7 seconds on average.

But when they had to shift from losses to gains, well now this took them much longer, often 11 seconds.

So, this says that once we think of something as a loss, the way we think is tending to attach to our heads and to resist our attempts to change it.

What I get from this research and research related to it Is that our worldview has a fundamental direction for a tendency towards negativity.

It's very easy to go from good to bad, but it's much harder to change from bad to good.

We realistically have to work harder to see the positive side of things. That is what matters.

So, think about the economy. Here we find economic prosperity from 2007 to 2010. You can see his landing as we all remember, later in late 2010 he recovered by the most objective procedures. But here we find consumer confidence in the same time period.

You can see it falling completely along with the economy, but then he seems to be suspended.

Instead of recovering with the economy itself, it seems as if consumers have been psychologically stuck there again in the economic crisis.

So strangely, this may require more effort to change our minds about how the economy performs and then to change the economy itself.

On a more personal level, what this research means to me is that you have to work to see the positive side.

Realistically, this requires work, this requires effort.

You can train on this; you can train your minds to do this better.

There is research at the University of California Davis explaining that once you write for a few minutes a day for the grateful things that exist, this can dramatically enhance your happiness and well-being…and even your health.

We can also get used to the good news and share it with others. We tend to think, rightly, that unhappiness tends to be shared.

This type of venting helps to get rid of our negative feelings in that we would feel better if we only talked about how terrible our day was.

And so, we keep talking to you and talking about the manager who leads us to madness, and about this friend who never called again and about that meeting at work where every little thing could have gone wrong has happened.

But we forgot to talk about good things. However, this is exactly what our minds need to practice at most.

So, my husband and who has this annoying habit from listening to what I say about what others have to do…and then it draws attention that, precisely, I am also human. (Laughter)

He began to listen to about two minutes in the days when I was becoming completely angry and complaining about everything.

And he listens and says, "Well, but what happened today that was something good?"

So, I told him about the student who came to me after the lecture with this interesting question.

I told him about the friend who suddenly emailed me this morning to just tell me, "Hello."

And at some point during my talk, I started smiling, And I started to think that maybe my day was very nice after all.

I think we can also work with our communities to focus on the pluses. We can become more aware that the bad thing tends to hang.

One annoying comment can bother someone all day or even all week.

And bad things tend to spread themselves, right? Someone makes fun of you and therefore makes fun of him and also makes fun of the next person.

But what if someone next time mocked you and you forgive him?

What if the next time I met a foul waitress and left a large extra tip?

Our minds may be prepared to look for negative information and then stop, but we can also retrain our minds if we add some effort.

And we started to see that cup…maybe it's a little more full than we thought at first.