Cockroach

During a recent lunch meeting, my trainee met a startling cockroach in his lunchbox. He hadn't even noticed that his mouth was hanging open. He rushed out of the room as if he had stepped on the teeth of a rake or slammed his thumb with a hammer.

Uh-oh.

Which leads me to the theory of negativity dominance hypothesized by the pyschologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust. Just imagine a single cockroach in your most favorite dish such as a bowl of cherries. I can hear the screaming already, although I can't make out if the word is "Help" or "Hell". Now you see. A single cockroach really is enough to render a bowl of delicious cherries inedible. But what about the other way round? Consider a a dish of food that you dislike: a bowl of lima beans, cockroaches, or whatever. What could you touch to that food to make it desriable to eat - that is, any suggestion of anticockroach? Nope. As anyone in his right mind will tell you, a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.

That Russian adage said it best: "A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar."

The point is not that it is never possible to make positive influence nor that there is no way to compensate. Rather, the point is simply that bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones.