Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman were the ones who originally coined the term negativity bias to describe this asymmetry. “Negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events,”
. . .We tend to focus on the constellation of threats as signifying some systematic program aimed at doing us harm. This is a manifestation of what I call “agenticity”—our tendency to infuse patterns (especially patterns of threat or harm) with meaning intention and agency. And so we imagine that disconnected misfortunes are commonly directed by intentional agents, sometimes operating invisibly. Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, governments, religious officials and big corporations all have played this role in conspiracist lore (and, in the case of the latter three entries, real life, too, it must be conceded). Taken together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of conspiratorial cognition.
There are many other paragraphs in the essay that I wanted to excerpt.
We automatically search for patterns and for stories–preferably involving supposedly culpable individuals–to explain those patterns. Recall that Ed Leamer’s macroeconomic textbook is titled Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories. Blaming the Fed is the simplest conspiracy-theory type explanation, which I try to resist.
Blaming every weather event on climate change would be another example.
Agenticity: a great word I hope goes mainstream. Agenticity gone haywire leads to conspiracy theories. Agenticitists (???) are blind to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and Charles Darwin’s Tangled Bank.
We don’t like repeating negative events. What can we learn from negative events? Very little if we avoid them. There is a anti-tautology, unsolvable.
Positive events? Find two positive events in a row and we memorize all the intermediate steps needed to repeat it. It is in the definition.
What about blaming recent societal changes on “elites”?
+1
I never did understand how Trump blamed the Clinton elite for moving factory jobs to China. (It was effective campaigning though)
Didn’t the Clintons pave the way for China joining the WTO, and hence making it much easier and cheaper to setup factories for export in China?
I was thinking more this blog, this post in particular (which I commented on at the time) stands out in my memory, but I think much of the Gurri material tends towards that direction.
If that’s not searching “for patterns and for stories–preferably involving supposedly culpable individuals–to explain those patterns” I don’t know what is.