Why sadness defeats joy

And if these facts are true - they are true (see, for example, the the website of the economist Max Rosner and the data concentrated inA site that tracks human progress collected from the repositories of the World Bank, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurostatt) - so why do the politicians and scholars on both sides of the political spectrum hurl at us prophecies of rage and destruction? First, news agencies are more likely to report bad news than good news, simply because that is their job. Another ordinary day in Turkey, where no revolution took place, will pass unnoticed. But try to take over a country without the world media covering the event. Second, as the psychologist explained Roy P. Baumeister In the article which he published with colleagues in 2001, and has already become a classic: "Evil is stronger than good." The authors reviewed a wide range of evidence from many areas of life and found that "negative emotions, bad parents, and negative feedback have a greater impact than their positive counterparts, and that negative information is processed more carefully than positive information. Bad impressions and negative stereotypes are created faster, and are more resistant to refutation, than positive impressions and opinions." why?

In my opinion, one of the answers is the psychology of loss aversion: on average, the pain of the loss is twice the joy of the gain. To convince someone to gamble, the expected profit must be twice the double loss. why? Because The ownership effect: the tendency to attribute to things that we own a higher value than we attribute to some thing that we do not own. In an experiment conducted by the economist Richard Thaler, for example, he gave subjects coffee mugs that cost 6 dollars and asked them at what price they were willing to sell them. The median price was $5.25. Subjects in another group were asked how much they were willing to pay for the coffee mugs. The median price was less than $2.75. Loss aversion and the ownership effect became even stronger as a result The status quo bias, or the tendency to prefer the situation to which we are accustomed. For example, we prefer the existing personal, social, economic and political arrangements over proposed alternatives.

Why is our psychology wired this way? The answer is: evolution. the psychologist Steven Pinker from Harvard University published an article in Cato's Letter in 2015 entitled "The psychology of pessimism.” In the article, Pinker argued that in our past, the evolutionary rewards for different behaviors were not balanced: the survival price for an overreaction to some threat was lower than the price for an underreaction. In our evolutionary past, the world was a more dangerous place, so it paid to avoid risks and be highly sensitive to risk. And so when things were going well, it was worthwhile to maintain the status quo.

All this helps to explain a significant part of the political pessimism, such as the one that hits us in every election. the sociologist Christian Smith Reviewer in his book "Believing, moral animals", which saw the light of day in 2003, the narratives that politicians and leaders weave to strengthen the moral base concerning each of the parties. And their stories ultimately boil down to a single template: "Once upon a time, in the distant days, the state of affairs was bad and bitter, while now everything is fine thanks to our party." Or "Once, in the distant days, everything was fine, but now the situation is terrible and terrible because of the other party." Sound familiar? Obama's election slogan in 2008 was: "We need a change" after eight years of a Republican presidency. Whereas the election slogan of Donald Trump in 2016 demanded to return America "to its greatness" after eight years of a democratic presidency.

And so I will diagnose John Stuart Mill In 1859: "A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, both are necessary to maintain a healthy state of political life."