Negativity

Day 77

There are 3 canteens on campus where you can find food at. There is LG1, LG5, and LG7. I usually go to LG1 - it's divided into a self-serve area, a cafe, a sit down order section, and dim sum. In my quest to eat better, I've lately been going to the self-serve where they let you choose 2 dishes. They offer 6 different ones daily from sweet and sour pork, to stir fried vegetabls, tofu, etc. I'm usually quite happy with the selection and if I try something new at least 1 dish would be good. Today, I picked a stir fried vegetable and a tofu dish and it was terrible. I forced myself to eat half of my meal and it was unbearable to get through. I was cursing blasphemy in my mind and wanted to tell somebody how aweful my meal was. Then it got me thinking back to how one negative experience out of the 50 meals I probably had there has ruined my experience. In a Marketing perspective, people can be perfectly satisfied with something for a prolonged period of time and from perhaps one freak negative occurrance it could completely ruin the entire experience. I remember a Marketing professor saying that negative feedback spreads 5 times as fast as positive feedback.

I started branching out to think about other affects of negativity. When something goes wrong, you can't wait to tell people NOT to go somewhere. In Pricing Strategy, we talked about how people are risk-averse in gains but risk-seeking in losses. We are inherantly afraid of loss and people will forgo gains in order to avoid losses. The psychology can also be applied to why people complain so much. People seem to complain because they feel like they had a right to something (good service, good product, etc etc) but now they have lost it and feel upset.

Why is it easier to complain than to appreciate?