Negative-Information Bias
Have you ever had a good day? I mean a really, really good day where everything is going your way. Only to have it ruined by one piece of bad news?
If so, you are not alone. We are predisposed to negative information. At least that’s what Psychologists tell us.
We react more strongly towards it than positive news. This is especially true if you’re trying to interview for a new job or trying to build support for a new project. Psychologists even have a name for this behavior, it’s called Negative Information Bias.
But why does it need to be this way? Why do we need to let our opinions be shaped by the negative?
I think part of the reason we are so sensitive to bad news is that we simply don’t realize what we’re doing. We have no idea we’re letting bad news affect us that much. If we simply choose to counter balance the bad with the good, we won’t be so overwhelmed. I’m not saying you won’t feel the bad news. Just that it won’t be so crushing.
Secondly, most of us get our meaning from our work. This is true if your work is cleaning the house, running a Fortune 50 company, or working on an assembly line. We have confused our jobs for our identities. Is it any wonder that negative news is devastating? It’s not just bad news, it’s an attack on who you are. It’s an attack on what you believe.
When your meaning comes from your work every negative piece of information is personal.
But what if you brought meaning to work? What if for you, meaning was based not on what you do, but who you are? How does that change things? How do you respond then?
photo provided by flickr
related information: Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain
This is a great distinction – from finding meaning in work, to bringing meaning to work. It is difficult for us not to get our ego too caught up in what we do and how we are perceived. It is human nature. I talked to a friend yesterday who told me after he was laid off a few years ago, he went into a severe depression for one year, until he got another job. Yikes! We are so fragile how we build our entire self-image around our career and job. This is a tough one, I think, to see your way through.
One thing that has helped me is to look at my job as an extension of God’s work through me – helping people, and bringing good things to others, rather than focusing so much on myself.
We definitely are fragile in our self image. Society puts so much emphasis on our jobs and what those jobs bring that we have a really hard time separating the job from our own identities. Most people, when they are laid off, fired, or not hired for a job see it as much of a personal rejection as a professional rejection. (I admit, I’m not always any different!)
The answer, I think, is in having a good anchor in where our true meaning comes from. If we do that, we can ride the ups and downs of life more easily.
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About Eric Barrett
Eric Barrett is an organizational development consultant who specializes in applying psychology to communication. He has worked in the OD field for over a decade, and is most recently working on developing social media guidelines for a real estate company. He also teaches psychology at Xavier University. In his spare time he...wait, who are we kidding...he has no spare time.
He is available on a limited basis for speaking engagements and consulting projects. For more information please see the About Meaning to Work page.
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