Edward B. Royzman

Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion

We hypothesize that there is a general bias, based on both innatepredispositions and experience, in animals and humans, to give greater weight to negative entities (e.g., events, objects, personal traits). This is manifested in 4 ways: (a) negative potency (negative entities are stronger than the equivalent positive entities), (b) steeper negative gradients (the negativity of negative events grows more rapidly with approach to them in space or time than does the positivity of positive events, (c) negativity dominance (combinations of negative and positive entities yield evaluations that are more negative than the algebraic sum of individual subjective valences would predict), and (d) negative differentiation (negative entities are more varied, yield more complex conceptual representations, and engage a wider response repertoire). We review evidence for this taxonomy, with emphasis on negativity dominance, including literary, historical, religious, and cultural sources, as well as the psychological literatures on learning, attention, impression formation, contagion, moral judgment, development, and memory. We then consider a variety of theoretical accounts for negativity bias. We suggest that 1 feature of negative events that make them dominant is that negative entities are more contagious than positive entities.

I Know, You Know: Epistemic Egocentrism in Children and Adults

This article reviews the evidence and theory pertaining to a form of perspective-taking failure—a difficulty in setting aside the privileged information that one knows to be unavailable to another party. The authors argue that this bias (epistemic egocentrism, or EE) is a general feature of human cognition and has been tapped by 2 independent and largely uncommunicating research traditions: the theory-of-mind tradition in developmental psychology and, with more sensitive probes, the “heuristics and biases” tradition in the psychology of human judgment. This article sets the stage for facilitating communication between these traditions as well as for the recognition of EEs breadth and potential interdisciplinary significance: The authors propose a life-span account and a tentative taxonomy of EE; and they highlight the interdisciplinary significance of EE by discussing its implications for normative ethics.

The Preference for Indirect Harm

We presented subjects pairs of hypothetical scenarios. The action in each scenario harmed some people in order to aid others. In one member of the pair, the harm was a direct result of the action. In the other member, it was an indirect byproduct. Subjects preferred the indirect harm to the direct harm. This result could not be fully explained in terms of differences in judgments about which option was more active, more intentional, more likely to cause harm, or more subject to the disapproval of others. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a new bias in judgment, a tendency to favor indirectly harmful options over directly harmful alternatives, irrespective of the associated outcomes, intentions, or self-presentational concerns. We speculate that this bias could originate from the use of a typical but somewhat unreliable property of harmful acts, their directness, as a cue to moral evaluation. We discuss the implications of the bias for a range of social issues, including the distinction between passive and active euthanasia, legal deterrence, and the rhetoric of affirmative action.

Something it Takes to be an Emotion: The Interesting Case of Disgust

We advance the thesis that emotions require abstract elicitors and flexible responses. Elements of our psychology that in other ways would qualify as an emotion are disqualified if all of their elicitors and responses are too concrete. Having advanced this thesis, we examine disgust. Disgust is an interesting case of a motivational pattern that seems too concrete on both ends to count as a real emotion. Notwithstanding, it is often included on lists of basic emotions (e.g., Ekman, 1992). We argue, however, that the theorists interested in promoting disgusts candidacy for the college of emotions have also argued that disgust is not as concrete as it looks. We suggest that they have done so in the face of the facts to advance disgusts candidacy, thus supporting our view.

Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages

Positive events are more common (more tokens), but negative events are more differentiated (more types). These observations and asymmetries about the world are consistent with a number of features or biases favouring positive adjectives that have been shown for English. Compared to their opposites, positive adjectives in English are more likely to be unmarked, negated into their opposite, define the entire negative to positive dimension, and occur first in conjunctions with their negative opposite. In this paper we document that these biases have considerable generality, appearing in all or almost all of 20 natural languages. The greater differentiation of negative states is illustrated here by the demonstration that five common nouns describing negative states in English (disgust, risk, sympathy, accident, murderer) have equivalents in most or all of the 20 languages surveyed, but the opposite of these nouns is not lexicalised in most of the 20 languages.

Limits of symhedonia : The differential role of prior emotional attachment in sympathy and sympathetic joy

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that compared with sympathy symhedonia (sympathy for anothers good fortune) is inherently more contingent on prior emotional attachment to its targets. As predicted, Studies 1-4 found that reported attachment was higher for past episodes of symhedonia than for those of sympathy and that recalled incidence of sympathy exceeded that of symhedonia when the target was a stranger. Study 5 showed that whereas symhedonia was significantly higher for high- versus low-attachment targets sympathy was not. Study 6 found that sympathy is more likely than symhedonia when a relationship is strained. Study 7 found that both sympathy and symhedonia are weaker for nonclose (vs. close) others, but the disparity is significantly smaller for sympathy than for symhedonia.

Minding the Metaphor: The Elusive Character of Moral Disgust

Aiming to circumvent metaphor-prone properties of natural language, Chapman, Kim, Susskind, and Anderson (2009) recently reported evidence for morally induced activation of the levator labii region (manifest as an upper lip raise and a nose wrinkle), also implicated in responding to bad tastes and contaminants. Here we point out that the probative value of this type of evidence rests on a particular (and heavily contested) account of facial movements, one which holds them to be “expressions” or automatic read-outs of internal states. We also observe a largely neglected difference between morally induced disgust and moral disgust proper, arguing that data such as Chapman et al.’s (2009) provide evidence only for the former.

On the relative preponderance of empathic sorrow and its relation to commonsense morality

Abstract Empathy is a nominally neutral term: in principle, the affective tone of empathic concern may be either negative (insofar as the relevant experience is that of apprehending and sharing in anothers aversive state) or positive (i.e., apprehending and sharing in anothers joy). Yet, we propose (Section 1) that, contrary to this standard conception of empathy as a potentially bivalent, generalized disposition towards emotional perspective-taking, in actuality, negative empathic responses, as a rule, (a) are more common, (b) are more differentiated, and (c) span a broader range of human relationships than their positive counterparts. Furthermore, we suggest that, barring certain types of privileged relationships, a failure to be empathetically aroused by anothers good fortune is subject to far less severe (if any) social disapproval than the failure to share in anothers aversive state. In Section 2, we posit that the negativity bias evident in the nature of our empathic concern may well be at the base of the negative–positive asymmetry found in the structure of commonsense morality, particularly as it expresses itself in the view that the furtherance of anothers good has a greater moral claim on us in its negative form (e.g., the relief of suffering) than in its positive form (the promotion of “enjoyment”). We conclude by asking whether this moral (and the underlying empathic) asymmetry warrants our normative concern and we suggest that there are at least two reasons to think otherwise.

Comment: Strohminger–McGinn: Deconstructing the Moral Amplification Effect

I use a number of McGinn’s (2011) ideas to identify likely confounds in the induction of incidental disgust as the basis of the moral amplification effect.

Facial Movements Are Not Goosebumps: A Response to Chapman and Anderson

Aside from adducing little data that bear on our original concerns (pervasive “audience effects” in the encoding of identifiable “disgust expressions”/lack of morally induced disgust versus moral disgust differentiation), Chapman and Anderson (2011) fail to muster a convincing body of evidence for the founding premise of their empirical endeavor—disgust is a bona fide “basic emotion” whose theoretically predicted FM pattern is a goosebump-like, metaphor-resistant readout capable of being effectively analyzed within the “expression programs” canon, leading us to reaffirm that our favored alternative, the “moral disgust as a metaphor” interpretation, is as consistent with all the pertinent data (including theirs), if not more so.