Winner
of
the
2017
Society
for
Experimental
Social
Psychology
Dissertation
Award
Why Good is More Alike than Bad: Implications for Classification, Generalization, Recognition, Social Comparison and Evaluation
Humans process positive information and negative information differently. These valence asymmetries are often summarized under the observation that ‘bad is stronger than good’, meaning that negative information has stronger psychological impact (e.g., in feedback, learning, or social interactions). This stronger impact is usually attributed to people's affective or motivational reactions to evaluative information. We present an alternative interpretation of valence asymmetries in processing based on the observation that positive information is more similar than negative information. We explain this higher similarity based on the non‑extremity of positive attributes, discuss how it accounts for observable valence asymmetries in processing (classification, categorization, generalization, recognition etc.), and show how it predicts hitherto undiscovered phenomena.