How Negativity Bias May Distort Your Perspective

What is the most vivid or visceral memory of your previous school day? Unfortunately, for many educators a negative situation will be the first thing that comes to mind—often in spite of generally having had a good, great, or possibly amazing day. Even if your first thought was of a wonderful experience, you likely have some negative ones trying to pull you away from that thought. In either case, you, like most humans, are experiencing negativity bias.

Psychosocial rehabilitation specialist Kendra Cherry has a great overview of negativity bias, which is “our tendency to not only register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events.” Human brains are hard-wired to pay extra attention to negative things because these would have historically been threats to our survival, and this tendency continues to be a part of our complex genetic makeup.

How negativity can overshadow the positive in teaching

A negative incident with a student or a continuing challenge with a group of students captures your attention disproportionately. This is both something I had to combat during my own decades of teaching and something I worked to shine a light on in my years as a new-teacher mentor. Negative-attention demanders should not overshadow the more abundant positives you are doing, achieving, and experiencing. This can only happen if you work against your wiring to bring the proportionate reality of the situation into focus.

But how? Recognizing that negativity bias exists in the first place is a great way to begin. If you started seeing yourself in descriptions in the previous paragraphs, that will help make this concept of negativity bias less abstract and more concrete and personal. You might next try a brief inventory of recent days to better quantify the true balance of negatives and positives. Here are a few examples from my own experience and what I often saw in those I mentored.

• More time and energy being frustrated and annoyed by the few students who were repeatedly tardy rather than enjoying and appreciating the far greater number of students who were early or on time every day.
• Overly discouraged by the very rare students who cheated on tests and thus overbalancing the joy of seeing those who worked really hard to master something that was a challenge for them.
• Letting a voicemail at the end of the day from a parent who had to rant (often with an incomplete understanding of a situation) bulldoze a whole lot of great student interactions throughout that day.

I did get better at dealing with this over many years in the classroom, as did my mentees when it was pointed out to them. It took constant vigilance and paying attention to those ingrained conversations at the end of a tough day or especially challenging situation.

Ways to counteract your hardwiring

Do you have stories that are similar to these? Can you think of other scenarios that led you to over-focus on the negative? With a little reflection, you may also see yourself caught in this negative-attention trap that no longer determines our survival. How could you have paid considerably more attention to what was going well while still coming up with a course of action to deal with whatever challenge was trying to disproportionately demand your time and thoughts? Below are five possible approaches, from simple to complex.

• Sticky notes: Write down some of the highlights throughout the day or week while they’re fresh and foremost in your mind, and use them as a counterbalance when you are tackling a more challenging situation.
• Margin notes: Note some of the highs and lows in your lesson plans as both positives and negatives arise. Whether you’re doing this on paper or in your digital files, having those notes in the context they arose in can be helpful in replicating the opportunities for positives and recognizing what might trigger the negatives.
• Journaling: There are a number of Edutopia articles about the value of reflection for both educators and students. Many folks bring their everyday journaling to teaching and can benefit from the continuity of their approach—just be cautious in not letting your writing replicate a negativity bias imbalance. If you have considered journaling in the past and haven’t started yet, this might be a good reason to do so.
• Peer partnerships: Hopefully you are already collaborating with others and can use that partnership to collectively conquer negativity bias. Again, it takes effort and intention to counter the tendency to focus on the bad. Break rooms, hallways, and offices are often rife with conversations generated by negativity bias amplifying each other. Those problems are real, but the mental space they take up will continue to be disproportionate if you let them.
• Institutional practices: On a bigger systemic scale, approaching this concept as a grade-level team, a department, or even an entire school can help balance things much more rapidly for a larger number of educators with benefits to students and staff alike.

In spite of how we are wired, you no longer need to magnify problematic instances to survive. Go ahead and give them their proportionate due and deal with them, but also be sure to pay attention to all the positives you both generate and encounter on a daily basis.