What is Negative Bias?
It’s one of the cognitive biases where we humans (yeah, not just your customers😃) have a more significant impact of negative events on our psychological state than positive ones.
So, you won’t remember winning 500 hundred Ruppes rewards from your bank, but you will remember losing 500 hundred if your bank made a mistake.
Role Negative Bias Plays in Your Customer’s Everyday Lives
Because Negative Bias every day influences your customer’s thoughts, and these two majorly determine whether they will take action.
Their Decision-Making🧠:
If your customer is too stepped around Negative bias towards you, they would likely imagine the outcome/interaction possibility with you to be negative – which would make them either not take a decision or delay it.
Which you don’t want them to do.
Their Motivation🏃♀️:
One of the fundamental core pillars of economics is Humans motivation with Incentives. It drives us, motivates us, and make us do all sort of weird things but, most of all, make us take action.
And in one research, it was suggested that as humans, our ability to complete a task (and get an incentive) depends highly on either if we are getting something or losing something.
Accordingly, most of us won’t make an effort to do something to get, let’s say, 100 Rs worth of Cashback, but we would definitely take steps to avoid a 100 Rs deduction event.
But why does it happen 🤔?
To explain better, I will use an example, where I will put an imaginary buyer persona name: Shyam.
Negative Bias has more potency:
In simple words, it means that though we take both positive and negative events as equal in our memory and have the same emotional impact, they are still not equal.
Consider this an example: one day, you were walking on the road and found a 100 Rs note – it’s a positive event. Now next week, you are walking on the same road, and you have the same level of mental state (though you have aged 7 days), and after reaching home, you realize that you have lost 100 Rs note – now this is a negative event.
But a positive one won’t stick in your memory. Loosing 100 rs note event will stick.
So, if Shyam has not had a good experience with a fruit seller, he will automatically have a critical approach with another.
Upcoming negative events are scary:
Let’s see how our beloved Shyam will react to different upcoming events:
The party is next week; he would be happy and looking to attending the party. Now this is a Positive Event.
But now let’s say our beloved Shyam had to sit for the exam next week or have some surgery appointment. Now this upcoming negative event.
In both cases, as the days get closer some emotion will fire up in our body, but with negative events, it will be stronger.
Negative Events take more mental juices:
Every day we interact with brands or even small businesses. And most of the time, our interactions are positive.
But sometimes, when things don’t turn around nicely, and we have some negative event – it takes more of our mental energy than positive ones.
So let’s say Shyam has three daughters, one is already married, and he took the service of “Mohan Caters” for her wedding. The wedding went nice, and there was literal praise of the food at the wedding. But on his second daughter’s wedding, “Mohan Caters” couldn’t deliver that level of quality, and even the arrangement was so poor that Shyam had to make the urgent arrangement (using mental energy).
Now for his next daughter’s wedding, he will be cynical of not just Mohan Caters but of all catering services providers in his city.
