Negative Bias & Peak-End Rule

Why We Notice the Negative

Richie

One of the reasons why people often question our focus on flourishing -- and say, "What about all the negative stuff?" -- is that they are fixated on the negative. And the reason why we get fixated on negative stuff, why media for example plays up negative kinds of events, is because they're actually more rare. Rarer events capture our attention more than processes which are more common, more continuous.

Even in situations that are challenging, there's a lot of activity during our day which is positive. We just tend not to notice it. We notice the negative stuff more because it's more surprising -- it's less frequent, and our brains are contrast detectors. They notice difference. And the negative qualities are more different than the positive qualities are, because the positive qualities are really our nature and they're more continuous. So we tend not to notice them.

Cortland

As an example of that: today there was a tragic shooting in Minneapolis. I'm from Minneapolis, as you know, Richie. It just struck home, because it's very close to where I grew up, and Minneapolis has just had such a rough ride these past few years. Everything that happened today -- I'm gonna remember that one thing, this horrific tragedy. But when I look at the course of the day, there are all these little moments: moments of cooperation, moments of connection, a million different little moments that I won't remember. I'll remember that one thing that stood out.

It's a perfect example. I'm gonna remember it: one, because it was emotionally salient -- it had an emotional charge. And two, because it was different. It was something that doesn't happen every day. But it's so easy for attention to naturally gravitate to those things. Even for memory, when we reconstruct our storyline -- here's the story of my life today, just one day -- those are the things that will stand out. It's like the peak-end rule. Some little blip on the radar, I'll remember that little blip. Not necessarily the baseline, not what was going on most of the day -- but I'll remember that little uptick.

The Peak-End Rule

Richie

You mentioned the peak-end rule -- let's explain that to our viewers. There are very few rules or laws in psychology, but this really is one of them. It was formulated by the late Daniel Kahneman. Danny was a psychologist but won the Nobel Prize in economics. He passed away about a year ago, and he was actually a good friend of mine, someone for whom I have enormous respect. He was the author of a major bestseller called Thinking, Fast and Slow.

He devised this peak-end rule, and basically what it's about is how we remember our experience. What the peak-end rule says is that we tend to remember the things that are at the peak of an experience, and we remember what happens at the very end of our experience -- and that's how we encode particularly emotional events.

So the way you describe your day: the peak may have been this horrific shooting in Minneapolis, but so much else occurred during the day. When you go to consolidate your memory for the day, it's gonna be dominated by what happened at the peak, and also by what happened at the end.

And it's helpful to think about that. If you know that a peak occurred which was disturbing, you can actually more intentionally plan your end. That's a kind of tip that is informed by modern science -- you can use any number of contemplative practices at the end of your day to really change the way you encode the memory of the day.

Causal vs. Fruition: Two Ways of Practicing

Cortland

This idea -- saying something like Born to Flourish, or the idea of Buddha Nature -- the idea that at our most basic fundamental level there is something good, something wholesome -- it sounds like a nice idea. It sounds like a nice theory. It's not so helpful, however, as a theory. It's much more helpful as something you can take as a jumping-off point to explore and analyze experience -- something you can taste, something that's more than just a concept or a belief.

One way to look at this is that in some respects, this is the most fundamental thing that we bring into our personal journey, our meditative journey. Because there are kind of two ways you could enter into the process of working on your mind and exploring your inner experience, as we do in meditation.

One way is with an orientation and a set of assumptions based on flaws and shortcomings. Whether we think about this or not, the basic assumption is that there's something wrong -- things we don't like about our experience, about ourselves, about the world, about our relationships, stuff that could be better, maybe a lot better. And then we do the practice basically as an endless process of trying to fix and improve what's going on.

In Buddhist terms, we call this the causal approach. It's called that because the kind of process you're going through is usually unconsciously viewed as a process of setting in place the causes and conditions for some better experience to happen in the future -- whether that's awakening, or just being more content or happier or less stressed out. But in any case, the goal line is off in the future.

What this idea is inviting us to consider is a totally different paradigm -- one in which the set of assumptions isn't that we're broken and we're gonna fix something. The set of assumptions is actually that we're fundamentally whole and we've just lost touch with that. And so the process, rather than fixing and improving, is a process of exploration and discovering the part that was never broken.

This is what we call -- as you know, Richie -- the fruition approach. Because the fruition, the endpoint, isn't in the future. It's actually here and now. And we're just learning to see and recognize something that's always present. It goes back to the idea of these qualities -- awareness, compassion, wisdom -- being innate. But that's not helpful as a belief system. It doesn't help you really to believe that, other than it might get you to look and to explore. The ultimate arbiter here is your experience -- we need to actually look and explore and analyze and see that for ourselves. And then it's a total game changer once we start to shift out of the problem mentality and into this "it's already here" mentality.

Richie

One of the really interesting corollaries of this kind of approach, I think for most people, is that it leads them to experience it as actually easier than we often think -- because we are this way to begin with. It's really about discovering this in ourselves, recognizing it, becoming more familiar with it. It's not about wrestling with our mind and trying to twist it in a different way. It's really just looking and discovering. It's a very different orientation, and it's more gentle. I think most people experience it as easier than they had imagined.

Cortland

Yes. It's one of the things you often hear: "It's so close, we don't see it. It's so easy, we don't believe it." We think it's gotta be more complicated than this. And sometimes when you do finally have an experiential taste, there's this feeling of, "Oh my God -- how did I not realize this? It's been right here." 

[Watch the full Dharma Lab episode: Science of Human Potential.]