The Negative Bias in Psychology

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I wonder if part of what causes this advice to focus on our weaknesses, just arises from this fundamental bias in our psychology. With the thing that you messed up, you might feel much worse about than the thing you did well at equally well. So there might be a kind of disproportionate impact there. I have a little model of success that I've been working on in my mind. Success is very, very loosely speaking, kind of a product of factors.

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To increase our chances of success (in whatever domain and using definition of success), should we focus on boosting our strengths or shoring up our weaknesses? Are we harsher in our critiques of ourselves than in our critiques of others? What should an ideal inner monologue be like? What are some useful taxonomies of pain? Are there times when irrational, magical, emotionally-driven, and/or delusional types of thinking are useful?

Anna Paley is insatiably curious about how best to live our lives. She is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from New York University, Stern School of Business in 2017. You can reach her at a.paley@tilburguniversity.edu.

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