Why we are so negative?

Life has many shades of colour, sometimes are all bright and colourful and others they are dark and shady, no matter what we do or happens we tend to point out the negative sides in life, that ends up taking us down and lose faith in what we do.

Every day we find ourselves making judgements, from the beginning of our day when we wake up we decide what clothes to wear, what to eat for breakfast, to take a way or the other for work, we decides things in a mechanical way, most of those judgments are not life-and-death situations. So Harvard University decided to make an experiment.

The instructions were to sit, stare at the screen, and if a blue dot flashes on it, press the button that reads, “Blue.” If a purple dot flashes on the screen, press the button that reads, “Not Blue.”

Each subject had to look at a thousand dots. And when a subject finished, the researchers brought in another subject and repeated the process: beige console, blank screen, a thousand dots. And so on.

Most of the dots were blue. Some of them were purple. Some of them were some shade in between blue and purple.

The researchers discovered that when they showed mostly blue dots, everyone was pretty accurate in determining which dots were blue and which ones were not. But as soon as the researchers started limiting the number of blue dots, and showing more shades of purple, the subjects began to mistake purple dots for blue. It seemed that their eyes distorted the colors and continued to seek a certain number of blue dots, no matter how many were actually shown.

This showed that the blue dots were merely a way to measure how humans warp their perceptions to fit their expectations. So we go to the next experiment:

“Initially, they showed them a large number of threatening faces. But as the experiment went on, as with the blue dots, they showed fewer and fewer—and the same effect occurred: the fewer threatening faces subjects were shown, the more the subjects began to misread friendly and neutral faces as being threatening.”

This time, the researchers had the subjects read job proposals. Some of these proposals were unethical, involving some shady shit. Some proposals were totally innocuous and fine. Others were some gradation in between.

Once again, the researchers began by showing a mix of ethical and unethical proposals, and the subjects were told to keep an eye out for unethical proposals. Then, slowly, the researchers exposed people to fewer and fewer unethical proposals.

People began to interpret completely ethical proposals as being unethical. Rather than noticing that more proposals were showing up on the ethical side of the fence, people’s minds moved the fence itself to maintain the perception that a certain number of proposals and requests were unethical. Basically, they redefined what was unethical without being consciously aware of doing so.

The Blue Dot effect suggests that our mind is conditioned to look for threats and issues, regardless of how safe or comfortable our environment is. when we have a better situation we tend to focus on the small problems, as a way to being «realistic» or not to get too excited. Our minds simply amplify our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience. That is why we fear success and material progress does not make us feel better about our future. We are expecting something to go wrong.

“This is the Blue Dot Effect. The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress.” Manson, Mark. “Everything Is F*cked”.

We are amplifying the negatives and minimizing out the positives, out of past conditioning. We must learn to appreciate what we have and the best conditions to enjoy the present and relax for the future to come.  Learn to be grateful for what you have and what you have become.