I recently read a fascinating research paper on psychology called "Bad is Stronger Than Good". By "good", the authors mean anything that we find to be pleasurable, desirable, or acceptable, and by "bad" they mean anything that is painful, undesirable, or unacceptable. This binary evaluation is an extremely well-founded and commonly accepted aspect of cognition. By "strength", the authors mean the causal power these experiences and judgments have. Therefore the thesis of the paper is that negative experiences affect behavior more than positive experiences.

Negative experiences are signals for change - if nothing changes, the negative experience is permanent. Whereas positive experiences are inherently dynamic, for they must change in order for an organism to adapt to a changing environment. Organisms respond quicker to negative responses than positive responses, because the negative warrants change, immediately.

A wide scope was used in this paper. It talks about parental influence, societal influences, personal experiences (emotions, memory, etc), sexual influences, and more. What I found to be interesting is how sexual failure can really screw up someone's life. One bad date can spell ruin for someone's entire psyche. The absence of bad traits in one's partner is more important than the instantiation of good traits; in the wild, it would have been advantageous and efficient to mate with a partner that was "normal" instead of "weird" - colorful feathers and large genitals would be merely icing on the cake.

In regards to memory, subjects tend to remember bad things more vividly than good things, but nevertheless focus on the good rather than the bad. This seems to be the case because what has happened in the past has already happened and must be discarded, but what was good in the past can be used as a means of comforting the self. A life can be a series of bad moments with uncommon good moments, but it can be seen as overall good when the bad memories are actively suppressed and the good memories are cultivated. Over time, negative memories are specifically targeted in order to reduce the intensity, despite the content remaining the same. This is all done in order to maintain a stable sense of self-worth. Bad experiences are stronger than good experiences, but the expectation of good experiences seems to be stronger than the expectation of bad experiences.

Because bad is stronger than good, good prevails either by the aforementioned selective judgments, or by sheer numbers. One "bad" experience requires approximately five "good" experiences - this can be calculated more precisely when subjects rate the experience of losing $50 to gaining $50 dollars: losing $50 is rated as much worse than gaining $50, and it is only when the subject gains a substantially larger amount of money that the good becomes sufficient to counteract a loss of $50.

One of the most interesting avenues in the paper is the linguistic side: in the English language, negative adjectives significantly outnumber positive adjectives, and subjects asked to put down value-related adjectives almost always put down more negatives than positives. There are more negative moods than positive moods, and thus negative adjectives are more prevalent to positive ones.

Additionally, the hedonic treadmill theory offers the view that, while moods normally can fluctuate from horrible to ecstatic, they inevitably fall back to a base state, typically seen as "euthymic". And when subjects are in a negative state, they typically make more rational decisions, whereas when they are in positive states, they typically make sudden and impulsive decisions.

I found all of this interesting because I myself find axiology interesting, especially in regards to how we evaluate scenarios. The absence of a good experience is not typically seen as a bad thing, because the magnitude and strength of a good experience is just not sufficient enough to warrant us to worry about its absence. Whereas the absence of a bad experience tends to be seen as what I label a "quasi-good" - something that is acceptable, sufficient, or expected. A quasi-good sets the basis, or the standard, for decision making. It is not equivalent to an actual good: obviously we would rather feel something pleasurable rather than just a neutral state. But this explains why negatives, like pain, are incentives or reasons not to do something, while positives, like pleasure, are merely permissability elements. You don't fix what isn't broken.

Yet this very asymmetrical reasoning is the result of us targeting the bad. We can't let the bad win. We have to find something to see as good, even if there is only bad. This faulty reasoning can be shown when you ask someone if they think helping someone is good (which they would say, yes), and then asking them if they think we ought to have a very large population in order to maximize how many people we help (which they surely would say, no). We continually see the triumph of man over evil as good (just look at revolutionaries), yet after analysis we reach the conclusion that this triumph over evil was just the transition from a bad state to a better (not necessarily good) state. Essentially, because we place so much emphasis on the negatives rather than the positives, we end up tricking ourselves into believing that the mere lack of a negative constitutes a good state. Pain is oppressive, and the triumph over pain is a hope. We constantly remind ourselves that we're in a good state by comparing ourselves to those who are worse-off, and while we are suffering we consistently have grass-is-always-greener thinking when comparing ourselves to those who are not experiencing our suffering. We quite literally create value out of nothing - the mere lack of a sensation constitutes a (quasi-)good.

When we make (deliberative) decisions, we typically make the ones we do because we feel the outcome will be good. This fact is quite obvious in normative theories like Utilitarianism - would you kill 1 person or 5 people? The Utilitarian (like myself) would argue that killing 1 person is better than killing 5 people - but we have to remember that killing a person isn't a good thing either. What a world we must live in, such that killing other people is an actual and necessary ethical decision!

This also explains what motives we have when we help other people. We don't help them just because we empathize with their pain, we help them so they can continue to be a human being. So they can survive. This would be adaptive behavior for organisms in a social environment.

Perhaps in a different possible world, a world in which sentient life is not formed from Darwinian processes of scarcity, sentients would not have the same intuitions. Perhaps good would just be stronger and more important. Perhaps no amount of danger would be sufficient to warrant sentients to actually pay attention and place more value on negatives.

The paper ends by arguing that a good life is not just one in which a person thinks they have a good life, but one that is filled with good experiences, far more goods that can outweigh the bads.