Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

  • Home
  • About
    • Farther to Go!
    • Personal Operating Systems
    • Joycelyn Campbell
    • Testimonials
    • Reading List
  • Blog
  • On the Road
    • Lay of the Land
    • Introductory Workshops
    • Courses
  • Links
    • Member Links (Courses)
    • Member Links
    • Imaginarium
    • Newsletter
    • Transformation Toolbox
  • Certification Program
    • Wired that Way Certification
    • What Color Is Change? Certification
    • Art & Science of Transformational Change Certification
    • Certification Facilitation
    • SML Certification
  • Contact

How Important Is Your Need to Be Right?

November 4, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

being rightA heavy investment in being right can lead to all kinds of problems, large and small, personally and interpersonally, even nationally and globally. The underlying source of our drive to be right is survival. Being right enhances our chances of staying alive. In the distant past, if we were wrong too often or about something really important—such as which food was poisonous or which animal was dangerous—we could have ended up dead.

Being and proving we’re right are knee-jerk reactions to perceived threats. Most of us no longer face the same daily threats to life our long-ago ancestors faced. But our brain doesn’t quite get that because it hasn’t changed all that much. It still operates the same way. To our unconscious (System 1), a threat is a threat is a threat—and that includes threats to our beliefs, our opinions, and our good feelings about ourselves and the people we care about. Furthermore, we not only want to see ourselves as being right, we want others to see us that way, too.

Our need to be right gets in the way of clarity in a couple of different ways.

First, refusing to acknowledge we could be wrong about something automatically clouds our judgment. It restricts what we are able to see and understand because we screen out anything that conflicts with the scenario in which we are right.

Second, an investment in being right creates a singular agenda. Rather than focusing on doing the right, or appropriate, thing in the situation, we’re more concerned about being right—or being seen as right—about what we’re doing.

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. We get addicted to being right. …Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. —Judith E. Glaser, Organizational Anthropologist

No one enjoys admitting they’re wrong, even to themselves. But we’re all wrong much more often than we’re right. And nobody’s perfect.

What you can do:
  • Recognize that you’re not alone: everyone has the same hardwired need to be right and to be seen as right.
  • If you’re feeling stuck about something, ask yourself if wanting to be right is getting in the way of your judgment or your ability to think clearly.
  • Remind yourself that you’re not still trying to survive on the savannah. Being wrong may be unpleasant or uncomfortable, but it’s highly unlikely to be fatal.

Additional reading: Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?

Filed Under: Brain, Clarity, Habit, Living, Mind, Unconscious Tagged With: Being Right, Brain, Clarity, Mind, Survival, Unconscious

Why All the News Is Bad: Our Negativity Bias

September 16, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

negativity-bias

Our brain’s own hardwiring for survival makes us vulnerable to stress and anxiety. It evolved to quickly detect threats in the environment and sound the alarm: time to fight or flee now! When we were facing multiple life-or-death threats a million years ago, it was definitely better to err on the safe side. If we reacted to something that didn’t turn out to be a real threat, no significant harm was done. But if we failed to react to something that did turn out to be a serious threat, it could mean the end of us.

The unconscious part of our brain was all about survival a million years ago, and it’s still all about survival today. Although the world we live in has changed radically, our brain has a ways to go to catch up. Operating at a much faster speed that we can consciously keep up with, making connections and seeing patterns that might or might not be there, the unconscious brain signals red alert at the slightest indication of trouble, setting into motion a cascade of physiological effects.

Sometimes this works for us, keeping us safe from actual harm; however, there are far more false alarms than real ones. And we pay a heavy price when this threat-detection system runs unchecked. It’s at the root of what is called the negativity bias. It’s why we notice, react to, and remember negative events to a much greater degree than we do positive ones.

The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. –Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

System 1: Danger, Danger, Will Robinson

Our unconscious shrugs off neutral or positive news or experiences, sometimes barely registering them, and hones in on the negative stuff. We have a stronger emotional reaction to negative stimuli, which increases the likelihood we’ll remember it. It takes less time for negative experiences to get stored in memory than for the positive experiences, which means our unconscious has more negative memories to draw on than positive ones when it’s evaluating information. And negative experiences affect us longer.

As a result, we are extremely sensitive to perceived or apparent threats. These days, those threats are less likely to be to our immediate survival. But that doesn’t make any difference to our brain. We react just the same whether the threat is to our ideas and beliefs, to our physical or emotional well-being, to our self-esteem, or to a freedom we hold dear.

We all have the same hardwiring. We are all primed to pay attention to the negative. At this point in time, the danger we’re facing is less a result of threats from the environment and more directly a result of our negativity bias. Whether in our intimate relationships, our international relations, or our personal health and well-being, the actual and potential costs of operating from the negativity bias are enormous.

So what can we do?

System 2: Belay that Order

One thing we can’t do is eliminate the negativity bias. It’s up to evolution to modify our perception of and reaction to threats. Hopefully that will happen before it becomes a moot point.

What we can do is develop an awareness of our predisposition to pay attention to and accentuate the negative. We can use System 2—our conscious attention—to:

  1. Notice the negativity bias in ourselves. It’s not easy to be aware of a cognitive bias in the moment, so often the noticing occurs after the fact. But that’s OK. If we continue paying attention, we’ll get faster at spotting the negativity bias in action. We’ll be less at the effect of it.
  2. Notice the negativity bias in others. The point isn’t to call other people out on it. We’re all operating on autopilot most of the time, and when we’re on autopilot we don’t think things through. If we’re aware that someone else is operating from the negativity bias, we don’t have to get caught up in the fear. We don’t have to react.
  3. Ask: Is there a real threat here or only a perceived threat? Once we become familiar with how the negativity bias works, we can develop the habit of evaluating our reactions and calming ourselves.
  4. Intend to pay attention to positive events and experiences. Yes, our attention naturally goes to the negative, but we can train ourselves to focus on positive things. We can intentionally include more pleasure, joy, and laughter in our lives.

Just because we have a negativity bias doesn’t mean we have to give into and continue feeding it. Let’s keep reminding ourselves that more often than not the threat really is all in our head.

Filed Under: Attention, Brain, Cognitive Biases, Consciousness, Habit, Memory, Unconscious Tagged With: Brain, Cognitive bias, Fear, Memory, Mind, Negativity Bias, Survival

Subscribe to Farther to Go!

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new Farther to Go! posts by email.

Search Posts

Recent Posts

  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
  • Always Look on
    the Bright Side of Life
  • The Cosmic Gift & Misery
    Distribution System
  • Should You Practice Gratitude?
  • You Give Truth a Bad Name
  • What Are So-Called
    Secondary Emotions?

Explore

The Farther to Go! Manifesto

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • On the Road
  • Links
  • Certification Program
  • Contact

Copyright © 2025 · Parallax Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in