joshwriting | You can't afford the luxury of a negative thought

siderea has a habit of posting thought-provoking notions and articles. Recently, she posted a snippet from http://psychotherapynetworker.com/index.php?category=magazine&sub_cat=articles&type=articles&id=The%20Politics%20of%20Negativity%20and%20Fear
on the role negative advertising plays and how negative impressions, once formed, are harder to eliminate than positives are.

This is not exactly new, conceptually. The aphorisms about people's reputations abound. Tearing down has always been easier than building up. A snippet from the article:

The most recent study on the effects of negative opinions appears in the August issue of Political Psychology. It shows that you can create negative attitudes so subtly that people dont even realize theyve been manipulated, and that once the attitude is established, it seems to inoculate the person against changing his or her mind. In a series of experiments, psychologists George Bizer and Richard Petty presented people with fake newspaper articles about two opposing candidates. Once participants indicated their preferences, the researchers asked half of each candidates supporters to rate how strongly they supported their candidate, and asked the other half to rate how strongly they opposed the other candidate, thus leading half the subjects to conceptualize their support negatively. Then Bizer and Petty gave everyone the second half of the articles, which presented damning facts about their preferred candidate.

Overwhelmingly, people whose attitudes had been negatively framed adhered to their support for their candidate much more than did the people whose attitudes had been positively framed. Thus negative framing seems to enhance a voters loyalty to his or her preferred candidate.

I was initially struck by this in the context in which it was written. The political implications were harsh and scary.

But while that still fascinates me, I am more moved yet by the following to implications:

Teachings of prejudice, whether structured or accidental, seem much the same to me. There are lasting images of stereotypes that are nigh unto impossible to shake. Ethnic humor is expressly included in that.

As important is our self-image. How easily to we absorb that negative self-image and how difficult is it, then to shake that off?

I find myself wondering what happens (or would happen, I suppose) if the people being poked at were told a) before; b) during; and/or c) after the experiment about this effect on their thoughts. Could they then successfully get past the negative to either a place of balanced neutrality or positive view?

To me, this all ties back to both the issue of "PC" vs. sensitivity and the issue of how we raise and teach children.