I have a personal theory (I'm sure it's not a novel one and it probably has a name) that human brains are naturally predisposed to negative thought than positive thought because our brains are essentially evolved prediction engines. And because it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it (e.g. it is usually less urgent to act on the signs of deer you might want to hunt and eat, than the sign of a tiger who might want to hunt and eat you), our prediction engines have a bias toward negative prediction. Conscious awareness of this fact (or rather, theory) has helped me curb negative thoughts at least to some extent.

I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.

Sounds like “loss aversion”, which was studied by Kahneman and Tversky.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

Negative statements also garner more attention from the tribe. This is why a lot of special interest groups are constantly carping about what they're against rather than what they're for.

> it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it

And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?

Evolutionary psychology just-so stories can justify anything as long as the premise that the organism will survive better in some defined local optimum is preserved.

I agree with this to a large extent. All prediction comes with uncertainty and a good survival strategy is to align towards the upper bound on risk and lower bound on reward.

It seems to be an established fact that humans are loss averse, and feel the pain of a loss more than the pleasure of a gain. This seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view - taking a risk to gain something, at the expense of losing something already in hand, seems generally maladaptive (perhaps moreso when you are old and frail, and less resilient to loss).

Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?

OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.

This makes perfect sense

People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it

In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern

If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug

Losses can be fatal and irreversible but gains almost never are irreversible.

Just another fundamental asymmetry in existence.

First of all if negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and if what you say is also generally true then humans will also be pretty much, in general, be in cognitive decline.

Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.

So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.

In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.

Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.

Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.

For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.

So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?

Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?

I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.

Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.

But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.

But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.

Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.

Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.