If you want to understand why bad news dominates media, why threats spread faster than opportunities, why criticism generates more engagement than praise, and why outrage consistently outperforms inspiration as a driver of viral content, you need to understand one of the most fundamental and consequential asymmetries in human psychology: the negativity bias. This is the well-documented tendency for negative events, information, and stimuli to have a disproportionately larger impact on psychological processes than equivalent positive events. It is not merely that negative things get noticed more than positive ones. They are processed more deeply, remembered more vividly, given more...