Well, as a matter of fact, yes, it could have been — even if all those things had actually happened. Call it negativity bias or affective asymmetry, but it is this: Relative to positive information, negative information carries more weight; moves us more strongly to act; and leads to greater learning — starting from infancy. According to this survival-based cognitive bias, we likely collectively succumbed to unwarranted negativity about the world in 2022 in at least three ways. This is a failure to accurately integrate positive and negative information by giving too much weight to the latter. Moreover, they are amplified because counterfactuals can be difficult to generate (i.e., it’s hard to remember the things that didn’t happen).

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