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Getting Stuck on Negative Thoughts Seems to Be Human Nature

Getting Stuck on Negative Thoughts Seems to Be Human Nature

Whether you are tackling a big job, crafting the perfect messaging for your next inbound marketing campaign, or challenging yourself to achieve a significant personal goal, how you present information—to yourself or an external audience—makes a difference.

Alison Ledgerwood, social psychologist at UC-Davis, has shown that once a negative enters our mind, it gets stuck there.

In her TEDTalk she outlines the results of their experiment presenting groups with the same scenario, only phrased in two different ways: 60% of jobs saved vs. 40% of jobs lost.

“Once we think about something as a loss, that way of thinking about it seems to stick in our heads,” Ledgerwood explains. “Our view of the world has a fundamental tendency to tilt to the negative. … We have to work to see the up side.”

Think about how this understanding of our human tendency toward the dark side impacts what you do as a marketer and as an individual. Political marketers have obviously understood this tendency for years, relying on the fact that a negative thought gets stuck in the listener’s mind and is hard to shake, even in the face of more positive revelation.

What are the implications for your own marketing messages?

How can you reframe your approach to your marketing job or how you write marketing content? How can you reframe your thoughts about the day? What about your day was good?

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