science

The Power of Bad and How to Overcome It review – professional Pollyannas


Without wishing to sound too Prince Andrew about this, there are hotels in New York where I won’t stay. One is called the Casablanca, and is extolled in this book as a fine example of how to stick it to the “power of bad”.

By “bad”, the authors don’t mean moral or aesthetic bad, but what they call negativity bias. That bias means an unfortunate impression outweighs a good one; a financial loss is more painful than an equivalent gain; and that a hotel’s many five-star reviews on TripAdvisor have no clout over potential customers who have read the single one-star review – particularly if it mentions rats’ droppings in the bed.

Something had to be done against this online bias. And so the Casablanca launched a charm offensive. “If you manage to connect with every single guest, you’ve given yourself an insurance policy against bad reviews because they’re unlikely to say something negative about someone who’s their friend,” argued the hotel’s Adele Gutman, who initiated a policy of what she calls “sparkling sunshine”.

John Tierney and Roy F Baumeister eulogise this offensive: “From the doorman to the bellhop everyone is supposed to beam – “Welcome to our hotel” – and treat the guest’s arrival as a singularly delightful treat: ‘This is your first time in New York? We’re going to have fun with you!’ The favourite part of our job is helping people make the most of New York!” Maybe I’m overcome by negativity bias but just kill me now.

The bellhop studies how you react to seeing your room and reports back to central control, who offer you a new suite if you’ve disclosed disappointment. Every evening there is free wine and cheese in the lounge so staff can take your spiritual temperature, learn of your every hitherto unexpressed whim and satisfy it. If, presumably, it’s legal. The hotel’s replies to online reviews are often longer than the reviews themselves. This minimises the risk of one-star reviews by obeying psychology’s peak-end rule, which is to leave customers thinking that even if their stay was all blocked toilets and cold showers, at least the staff seemed to care. “We’re devastated to hear that you did not enjoy your one-night stay with us,” went the Casablanca’s reply to a one-star review complaining about street noise.

The result? The Casablanca has conquered bad. It has had a five-star ranking on TripAdvisor for more than a decade. Even so, I’d rather stay in Fawlty Towers than be haunted by irrepressible extrovert staff sparkling non-stop sunshine during my stay and nice-trolling me online.

What Tierney and Baumeister don’t realise is that there is not just a power of bad but a curse of good too. That’s the sequel right there. But they would be ill-equipped to write it since they are professional Pollyannas who have read too little Adorno and listened to too much Bing Crosby, so they accentuate the positive to the point of complacency. “We really are living in a golden age,” they write, “even if most people believe otherwise.” Elsewhere they add: “We are richer, healthier, freer and safer than our ancestors could have ever hoped to be, yet we don’t enjoy our blessings. The Great Enrichment continues and it will proceed even faster if we can overcome the real crisis by learning to ignore the fearmongers.”

Walter Benjamin wrote of the angel of history moving backwards into the future with debris piling up around his feet, eyes on the ruin of the past. Tierney and Baumeister don’t roll that way. Ignore the debris and the naysayers. Keep your eyes on the prize. Only Cassandras like me doubt there is a prize.

Clearly I need to cultivate a positivity bias. But how? The authors have an idea. Each Thanksgiving, diners should write down things they are grateful for on a tablecloth. “The effect gets stronger every Thanksgiving that you reuse the tablecloth and it makes for good reading the rest of the year too.” I’m grateful for every Thanksgiving I don’t spend counting my blessings with Tierney and Baumeister.

If their cure to me seems worse than the disease, they are at least astute at diagnosis. The adaptive traits that served our ancestral hunter-gatherers on the savannah hobble us in the 21st century. Those of our ancestors who survived sensibly focused more on avoiding poisonous berries rather than finding the delicious ones. Today we’ve become Chicken Littles, so irrationally fearing that the sky will fall that we hurry into the Fox’s lair where, ironically, we get murdered.

The authors capitalise Fox in making this point, and I hoped they were subtly indicting Trump’s favourite news medium. One reason, after all, for the power of bad is what they call the crisis industry of journalists, politicians and social media blowhards. Consider terrorism: “Randomly murdering a few innocent civilians was strategically pointless until the late 19th century. Only then, as the telegraph and the cheap printing presses began quickly spreading news, did terrorists discover the power of a single horrendous act.” Yet like several reactionary, improbably upbeat analyses of current politics in the book, this perspective serves neocon values. It wasn’t scaremongering hacks who created Isis; invading Iraq had something to do with it. No matter. The crisis industry makes us worry about jihadists when we should be more concerned about bathtubs. Those killed worldwide by Al Qaeda and Isis is fewer than the number of Americans who died in their baths, Tierney and Baumeister contend. The irrational negativity bias explains how, as they put it, “countries blunder into disastrous wars, why neighbours feud and couples divorce, how economies stagnate, why applicants flub job interviews, how schools are failing pupils”. And why American taxpayers bankroll spiralling defence expenditure instead of spending a few bucks on non-slip bath mats.

For the authors, our task is to use innovative rational thought to stop such flubbing, stagnating and blundering. They chart in engaging detail how Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgarten overcame his (quite understandable) negative thoughts about plummeting to death from space by means of cognitive behavioural therapeutic techniques such as repeating mantras and deep breathing. As a result, he acquired the power of positive jumping, falling from a helium balloon in the stratosphere in 2012, reaching 843.6 mph before he touched down in New Mexico 24 miles and four minutes 19 seconds later. Good for Felix: he’ll never be my role model.

The authors believe we shouldn’t eliminate the negative but harness it for good. They rip into the 1970s self-esteem movement that was devised to thwart the power of bad but that led, they claim, to schools ringfencing students from failure. It’s nuts, they argue, for alienated schoolboys to be chided for playing violent video games. Why? Because being killed online and forced to begin again better prepares them for overcoming failure in the real world than having fragile egos incessantly massaged with school prizes and no real competition.

The moral? Sticks work better than carrots. “It’s fine to reward your children for good report cards,” Tierney and Baumeister counsel, “but you should also deduct something from their allowance if the grades show they’ve been shirking.” That way kids learn to shape up. Sometimes it’s good to be bad.



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