The same characters always cavort on the sunny side of life. A look at the beautiful, rich, lucky people on Instagram is enough to get this funnel. The people kissed by chance stand around in the same poses in front of the same status symbols, show the same smile and are confusingly similar to each other.
Where the bright light of happiness falls, there are few shadows and hardly any contrasts. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy provided the literary quote for this advantage with his opening sentence of “Anna Karenina”: “All happy families are similar to each other, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he wrote there. And apparently he hit the nail on the head: since then, psychologists have been dealing with the question lying dormant in this statement and have repeatedly come to the conclusion that the bad has more facets than the good.
Rumen Iliev of the Toyota Research Institute in Los Altos, USA, and Will Bennis of the Prague University of Economics and Business have just published a study that adds another chapter to the research literature on this phenomenon. Happy, healthy and wealthy people are more alike in many parameters – such as personality and values - than people who are less spoiled by life. The researchers report this in a work published on the pre-print server PsyArXivwhich has not yet been reviewed by other scientists.
Iliev and Bennis evaluated several large data sets for their work. These include the Australian Hilda study, for which more than 17,000 participants were regularly surveyed between 2001 and 2016. For the data set, the Big Five personality traits of the subjects were also queried, probably the most common measuring instrument for personality. In addition, the health and satisfaction of the participants were determined for the study. In addition, Iliev and Bennis analyzed part of the World Values Survey, for which more than 89,000 participants from 60 countries had provided information on similar parameters over a period of several years. In both sets of data, the results in the Big Five personality analyzes were more similar the more the people concerned were on the sunny side of life. In both studies, these people also achieved results in cognitive tests that were more similar than those of the subjects who had a harder time in life.
In recent decades, psychologists have found numerous proofs of the greater variety and the stronger effect of the negative. For example, people remember bad events better. They recognize words with sinister meanings more quickly, and there are more of them in most languages: the semantic space occupied by the bad expands further than that claimed by the good. For example, the description of negative emotions draws on a larger vocabulary than that of happy states. Bad news gets more attention anyway. And finally, reprehensible actions awaken a stronger need to name the cause and perpetrator – which quickly leads to an illusion of causality.
Apparently, then, Iliev and Bennis conclude, Leo Tolstoy spoke a truth in his great first movement of “Anna Karenina”. The question remains why the bad is more diverse? One can only speculate about that. Presumably, such an idea, negative events provoke greater pressure to understand and analyze them – in order to be able to avoid them in the future.