Stepping Out of the Shadows
6/22/20261 hr 29 min
Why does one bad experience have the power to overshadow an otherwise good day? Psychologist Alison Ledgerwood explores the negativity bias, the deeply human tendency to hold on to what went wrong and overlook what went right. She explains why our minds are drawn to losses and threats, and what it takes to rebalance our attention. Then, on Your Questions Answered, psychologist David Pizarro returns to respond to your comments about the surprising role of disgust in shaping our lives.
In our companion conversation for Hidden Brain+, we explore how politicians and the media exploit the negativity bias. If you're a subscriber, that episode is titled “Going Negative.” If you're not yet a subscriber, you can get a free seven-day trial of Hidden Brain+ by going to support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hidden brain.
If you love listening to Hidden Brain, you'll love watching it as well! Check out our new YouTube channel for Shankar's videos about how your memory works, tips for performing under pressure, and much more.
Episode illustration by Getty Images for Unsplash+
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsShankar Vedantam· Host0:00
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Imagine you're an architect, but instead of drawing up a plan for a skyscraper or a bridge, you've been asked to design the most sophisticated edifice in the universe, the human brain. [gentle music] Getting to work at your drafting table, you'd likely prioritize accuracy. You want this brain to perceive the world exactly as it is, a perfect mirror of reality. In your blueprint, the good and the bad, the rewarding and the threatening, all would be treated the same. Every event, every experience would be assigned equal weight, given the same attention, and remembered equally. But as any architect will tell you, there is a vast gulf between a design that works on paper and one that actually survives the elements. The same is true of our own minds. The architect of evolution wasn't interested in making us objective observers or serene philosophers. It wasn't trying to design a brain that took a fair and balanced view of the world. It was building a survival machine. To survive in a world filled with menacing predators, scarce resources, and social traps, the brain had to be designed with a series of built-in biases. Those are the same brains