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Negativity/positivity ratios
Jan. 16th, 2024 03:57 pmWhen it comes to individuals, there are a couple pop psychology factoids that get tossed around to the effect of "it takes X positive comments to outweigh one negative comment," where X is some number greater than one. Some of these are "in practice, we found that well-performing teams/relationships feature more positive than negative feedback," and others are "in theory, this is how you should do it" (which doesn't always work). I'm not sure how rigorous this research is, but it seems intuitively plausible that, when presented with a mix of positive and negative feedback, some people tend to focus on the negative and ignore the positive, so their overall emotional reaction will tilt negative, even if the mix of inputs was about 50/50.
Okay, that's about individuals, and that's pretty well-known. To me, however, there seems to be a corollary that follows from this, but that I haven't heard other people discuss in these terms.
Pretty much any group has good and bad aspects to its history. Suppose you have group X of people, and you list some of the good things and bad things that the X have done over the years, and that ratio skews about 50/50. Suppose that some of the people you're talking to are also members of group X. They may not necessarily identify as X, or think about being X a lot, but if you're giving a talk specifically about the history of X, that identity is likely to become much more salient. The above finding suggests, to me, that the emotional takeaway from the X in the audience is going to be negative.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; whatever reasons you had for giving a talk about the history of X in the first place might be good ones, and the emotional state of your audience might not be very important. Or, depending on your goal, making them upset might be a feature, not a bug. But it's something you should expect!
Okay, but I've made an important hypothesis here; I assumed that the good things and bad things in the history of X are about 50/50. Is that fair? Surely, there are some groups somewhere in space and time whose contributions to human history have been much worse than 50/50. There have probably been some whose contributions have been better, as well. Let's grant for argument that there was a society Y, whose good deeds outweighed their bad deeds by a significant factor like 5-to-1. If I talk about the history of Y, will the Y in the audience come away feeling generally happy about their Y identity?
No, they won't, because there won't be any Y in the audience. Because the general pattern in history is that the people from society Y get slaughtered by the people from society X, who live to write the history books.
