Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation: A review of explanations.

“The negative focus was first documented by Carlson's (1966) survey of psychology textbooks, in which he found twice as many chapters (121 vs. 52) devoted to unpleasant as to pleasant emotions, and a similar imbalance was found in lines of coverage and use of specific words.”

“There have been thorough reviews of negative bias in impressions (Baumeister et al., in press; Fiske, 1980; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), so we will limit our discussion here.”

“A wide variety of research has suggested that negative aspects of an object, event, or choice are weighted more heavily than positive aspects in judgments (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984; see Czapinski & Peeters, 1990; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989, for reviews).”

“However, in studies of impression formation and person perception (e.g., Anderson, 1974; Fiske, 1980; see Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Taylor & Fiske, 1978 , for reviews ), the stronger weighing of negative than of positive information has been explained in informational terms by the higher…”

“Although this bias is so pervasive that it has been called the "fundamental attribution error" (Ross 1977), it is more pronounced for negative than for positive behaviors (for a review, see Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), in particular in the morality domain.”

“A growing catalog of errors, biases, and asymmetries points to the conclusion that negative information more strongly influences people's evaluations than comparably extreme positive information (Kanouse & Hansen, 1971; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“Skowronski and Carlston (1989) reviewed research on impression formation and found support for a negativity bias in impression formation, and Cacioppo and Gardner (1993) found evidence for the negativity bias in their review of research on attitudes toward blood and organ donations.”

“One might assume that individuals assign greater weight and attention to patterns of interaction that are harmful to their own well-being than to patterns that are helpful to their own well-being (cf. Fiske, 1980; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“The first is diagnosticity theory, or the idea that negative information is more informative, insofar as it deviates from the norm (Baumeister et al., 2001; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“…about consumer reaction to negative publicity about a known brand, the issue of how consumers process and integrate negative information with positive information has been studied in the impression formation literature in psychology (e.g., Fiske 1980; Klein 1996; Skowronski and Carlston 1989).”

“For example, attitude researchers explore how people integrate positive and negative features of a stimulus into an evaluative judgment ( Skowronski & Carlston, 1989 ; Tesser & Martin, 1996 ).”

“Although some studies have focused on more successful films, such as the top 50 or the top 100 in Variety lists (De Vany and Walls 1997; Litman and Ahn 1998; Smith and Smith 1986), our study contains a random sample of the films (both successes and failures).”

“This is because failure can be attributed to many causes, but ability can be demonstrated only through successful performance (Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989).”

“In this respect, our studies bear similarity to impression formation studies, which typically involve judgments about hypothetical personality profiles and tend to emphasize the role of heuristic processes, such as confirmation bias, primacy effect, and negativity effect (Fiske, 1980; Hamilton & Huffman, 1971; Skowron…”

“…moderately, very), the sheer frequency with which stimuli occur in the real world, and category activation processes (e.g., French-Lazovik & Gibson , 1984; Gannon & Ostrom, 1996; Hardin & Birnbaum, 1990; Rotter & Tinkleman, 1970; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Wedell & Parducci, 1988, 2000).”

“Skowronski and Carlston (1989) summarize a number of theories that attempt to explain this negative asymmetry bias.”

“For example, research has investigated the effects of wrongdoing associated with competence or capability and those associated with character or integrity (e.g., Mishina et al., 2012; Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989).”

“We speculate that this reflects a general tendency, observed in the impression formation literature (e.g., Anderson, 1965; Fiske, 1980; Hamilton & Zanna, 1972; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989 ), to disproportionately weight negative information when making judgments.”

“From the information process perspective, it can also be argued that negative information has stronger influences on individual’s judgement and choice than positive information (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“However, when the integrated information pertains solely to competence, a positivity effect is found (Brycz & Wojciszke, 1992; Kubicka-Daab, 1989; Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989; Wojciszke, Brycz, & Borkenau, 1993).”

“Other studies, however, find rather the opposite (e.g., Gershoff et al., 2003; Skowronski and Carlston, 1987, 1989).”

“Other aspects of social perception that were initially viewed as ‘‘biases,’’ such as greater sensitivity to negative information than to positive, are now also conceptualized as adaptive and pragmatically useful (Peeters, 1991; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Wentura et al., 2000).”

“Specifically, we find evidence that temporal contiguity cues mitigate the negativity bias even in an environment in which negative information is less frequent and thus potentially more diagnostic (Skowronski and Carlston 1989).”

“The cue diagnosticity framework views product quality assessment as a categorization process in which consumers use the available cues to assign a product to a specific quality category (Feldman & Lynch, 1988; Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989).”

“Negative information alerts to potential dangers (13); it has special value in terms of “diagnosticity” (14), or the “vigilance” (15) that is required to avoid negative outcomes.”

“Second, there is strong evidence for a pervasive negativity bias in social judgment and self-regulation (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Taylor, 1991), which leads people to attend to and be more influenced by negative stimuli than positive stimuli.”

“Consistent with this view, the impression-formation literature also demonstrated that people placed more weight on negative rather than positive information when evaluating a product (Fiske, 1980; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“These findings complement prior research on impression formation (e.g., Rosenberg & Sedlak, 1972; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989 ) by providing evidence in support of the claim that differences in the way individuals weight and process information affects specific expectations, which in turn, may influence interpersonal…”

“…effects (Madon et al 1997, Major et al 1988), whether diagnosticity varies according to whether traits concern ability or morality (Reeder & Brewer 1979; Skowronski & Carlston 1987, 1989), and about the role of global and circumscribed accuracy of expectations (Stukas & Snyder 1995, Swann 1984).”

“Indeed, people appear to use negative information more readily than positive when it comes to impression formation (e.g., Anderson , 1965; Fiske, 1980; Peeters & Czapinksi, 1990; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“…formation has consistently found that signs of bad behavior immediately capture our attention when forming character judgments (Fiske, 1980; Pratto & John, 1991; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989) and increase rates of learning about the traits of others (Siegel, Mathys, Rutledge, & Crockett, 2018).”

“Indeed, negative information is known to be more informative and persistent than positive information (Skowronski and Carlston 1989), and customer trust is more easily lost than restored (Holmes and Rempel 1989).”

“Finally, additional research in social psychology (Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989; Reeder & Spores, 1983) has shown that negative information tends to outweigh positive information in people’s evaluations of most issues or objects, particularly those related to moral judgment (e.g., “right” vs.…”

“These findings are indicative of a negativity bias, whereby negative information has a systematically stronger impact on judgment and choice than objectively equivalent positive information (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“…assumption underlying the novelty explanation is that novel or unexpected information is more diagnostic than expected information (Fiske 1980; Skowronski and Carlston 1989). subsequent effects of such detection on overall evaluations (e.g., the omission detection model; Kardes 1988;…”

“In general, there is substantial evidence for the attention-grabbing power of negative information (e.g., Fiske 1980; Skowronski & Carlston 1989; Pratto & John 1991).”

“Research on impression formation, studied largely with American and Western European samples, shows that negative information more strongly influences people’s evaluations of others than does comparably extreme positive information (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989).”

“Further support for the asymmetry hypothesis stems from research showing that negative events have greater psychological impact than positive events in most contexts (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Taylor, 1991).”

“On the one hand, research in social psychology has often demonstrated that negative information has a stronger impact on people’s attitudes and impressions than positive information (see Skowronski and Carlston 1989; Rozin and Royzman 2001).”

“Repeated exposure to negative reviews is particularly damaging to booking intention, which accords with the negativity effect proposed in the past (Skowronski and Carlston, 1989).”

“…possible negative outcomes generally tend to loom larger than positive outcomes (Eyal, Liberman, Trope, & Walther, 2004), and research on the negativity bias (e.g., Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998; Skrowonski & Carlston, 1989) suggests that these negative thoughts carry considerable weight.”

“…to the negativity bias: Humans tend to be mildly optimistic; negative information is thus further away from our expectations than is positive information; and we thus view negative information as more deviant and potentially more useful as well (e.g., Fiske 1980; Skowronski and Carlston 1989).”

“Other models argue that negative information, especially in the domain of morality judgments, receives a higher weight (De Bruin & Van Lange, 1999; Reeder & Coovert, 1986; Skowronski & Carlston, 1987, 1989).”

“…that consumers typically give greater weight to negative information than to equally extreme but positive information (Fiske 1992; Kanouse and Hanson 1972; Skowronski and Carlston 1989), so it is likely that consumers will trust online negative eWOM information more than positive information.”

“According to the accessibility– diagnosticity theory (Feldman and Lynch 1988; Skowronski and Carlston 1989) negative information has a systematically stronger influence on judgment than the equivalent positive information (Ahluwalia and Gürhan-Canli 2000; Herr, Kardes, and Kim 1991).”

“The valence findings are reminiscent of the well-documented asymmetry in impression formation concerning the typically greater impact of negative information about a target on social judgments (see Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Taylor, 1991).”

“…by various variables such as its content, that is, the amount of strong and diagnostic information (Anderson 1981; Petty and Cacioppo 1986; Skowronski and Carlston 1989), its level of repetition (Anand and Sternthal 1990), and the ability of the respondents to counterargue it (Petty and…”

“People often consider negative information more useful than positive information (e.g., Kanouse & Hanson, 1971; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Taylor, 1991).”

“Research on these models has demonstrated that differential weights may depend on, among other things, the salience of the information (Fiske, 1980), the diagnosticity of the information (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), and the reliability of the information (Birnbaum & Stegner, 1979).”

“The most common explanation for the asymmetry principle is that negative information is more informative or diagnostic than positive information (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989; Siegrist & Cvetkovich, 2001).”