Picture this: You’re sitting on a train to see a friend of yours you haven’t seen in a long time, sipping your favorite coffee order, and looking at a beautiful landscape outside the window. Everything is going great. Right up until someone sits right next to you, chatting loudly on the phone and ruining that peaceful journey of yours. Even though the train gets to its destination on time and without a hiccup, do you think you are most likely to mention the coffee, the landscape, and the quiet of the first part of the journey, or that annoying seatmate, when you friend asks how the journey’s been?
If you chose the latter, it’s not because you are a particularly pessimistic person. It’s all very normal, part of a common phenomenon known as negativity bias.
What Is The Negativity Bias?
The negativity bias is defined as an overattention to the negative aspects of an experience as compared to positive ones that carry the same emotional load. It affects the way we process and remember information, but also the way we interpret the world around us and make decisions. In short, it makes us value and remember the “bad” much more than the “good.”
The origins of the negativity bias are still under debate, and different theories have been raised, but one thing seems clear: It’s so ingrained in our biological profile that it even shows up as a functional asymmetry in our brain. That means that certain regions involved in emotional processing (like the amygdala and the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex) tend to process negative stimuli faster, or respond to them in a stronger way, showing that a greater weight is assigned to averse stimuli and situations as compared to neutral and positive ones. This has been corroborated by electroencephalography (EEG) studies isolating larger late positive potential amplitudes, which are a measure of stimulus significance, for negative rather than positive stimuli.
These neurobiological markers translate in a negative overattention that can be seen at the behavioral level from a very early age, which tends to rule out the possibility of the bias as a learned behavior. According to evolutionary theories, the bias might be tied to an early and adaptive response to threat, which hardwired us to be wary of negative or ambiguous stimuli in order to safeguard our species’ survival.
The Negativity Bias In Marketing
Given the power of negativity in shaping the perception of the world and, most importantly, our impressions and judgements, it is only natural that our industry has learned to leverage this bias as a way to get more content traction online. Think about those TikTok videos that start with a deceptive hook along the lines of “Why I’ll never buy [brand]” to then list only positive aspects of the experience. Or the way clickbait headlines still work, despite the fact we know exactly what the media are doing.
Several marketing studies have shown that CTRs are higher across different channels (including SEO) when we use negative superlatives as compared to neutral or positive ones, something that has been confirmed in a large Nature study on the consumption of negative news.
So, it is a known fact that, from the first touchpoints until the very last, negativity is a way to capture and retain the most precious commodity of today’s age, attention. However, what a lot of brands fail to acknowledge is that it can be a double-edged sword as well.
Because if it is true that our curiosity is piqued when we see something negative, it is also true that we are very quick at abandoning the journey when we realize we’ve been tricked into a click that wasn’t worth our time. And once people drop a journey, they are not likely to give it a second chance, particularly if they’re not already invested in the brand.
This doesn’t only have to do when brands are not delivering on their early promises (such a discount claimed on a title that ends up only being available under certain caveats, or an outdated pricing), but also includes the later stages of the experience, too.
An annual study by Baymard analyzing reasons for cart abandonment (when users have already put energy and time into evaluating offers and deciding to convert) found that a large portion of these blockers have to do with UX issues such as no guest check-out, insufficient information, and too long processes, rather than a misalignment of expectations:
And most times, these “bad portions” of the journey are the ones that tend to be remembered, rather than all the positives that users have encountered before the blockers. One bad experience can taint a website’s reputation in the prospects’ eyes, and represent a threat to the brand as a whole (see, for example, what happened with Coca-Cola and its AI ad recently).
How Can Brands Avoid Losing Customers To The Negativity Bias?
Even when a decision is made on the basis of rational arguments, it’s often the way someone feels about a product or brand that seals the deal. That’s the reason why you want to account for negative experiences (and how to fix them) in your customer acquisition and retention strategy.
Here are my top three tips to put in the agenda for a negativity-free 2026:
1. Removing Ambiguity
First of all, brands need to commit to transparency. The balance between negative and positive is skewed unfavorably when there is insufficient information.
Anytime someone needs to validate a brand’s legitimacy online, or the reliability of their processes and services, it’s an indicator of something that needs to be made clearer or more prominent earlier on in the journey. Isolating brand queries from internal analytics or social listening tools is a good starting point to really figure out what might be the ambiguity that becomes a blocker in the path from awareness to transaction.
2. Minimizing Unnecessary Frustrations
We have seen how the journey can be cut short even when the user is very motivated to complete an action, and how this can be tied to very specific negative experiences that outweigh all the positive aspects of an online journey. Sometimes, the mishaps we come across a website can be the equivalent of that annoying seat mate in our journey from intention to action. It can even drive us to change carriage.
So, in order to prevent dropouts, we don’t only need to fix the reported issues – we need to proactively remove the barriers our users have yet to encounter: cognitive load that produces decision paralysis, distractors that affect purchase intention, intrusive pop-ups that block a natural navigation, and much more.
Ultimately, your job has to help make the journey as smooth as possible and provide the path of least resistance to the action your users want to take.
If you’re looking for ways to get started on this, you can start by isolating behavioral data and potential friction points via surveys, CX logs, heatmapping tools, and ngram analysis from platforms that collect first-hand experiences belonging to both the awareness and the post-purchase stages.
3. Turning Flaws Into Ways To Connect With Customers
You know what’s a perfect example of this? 404 pages.
No one cares about them, especially when they’re a fraction of the millions of URLs a user can land on, but for some, they will be their first impression of a business. This is a particularly likely scenario when we know that AI assistants make up URLs and send users to broken pages more often than it would occur with a traditional search engine.
While we know that first impressions tend to last, particularly if they’re negative, the very last stages are equally important and should be given just as much attention.
If a user lands on a 404 page after evaluating all the offers that are relevant to them, that one annoyance has the potential to be pervasive of the entire experience, affecting the perception of the brand or service as a whole.
But here’s the thing: If you take that opportunity to turn that one frustration into a chance for connecting with your user, you might still come out on the winning end of that interaction. Negative is memorable because it makes us feel a certain way – so we need to find ways to produce another emotion that can compete with it.
You can do so by acknowledging users’ frustration in a way that makes them smile, and providing them with an alternative path to reach the same goal, like on this page by Tripadvisor:
Or switching it up completely, and turning the experience into a positive one by leveraging surprise, delight, excitement.
It might seem almost too simple, but we need to remember that humans are much less complicated than we make them out to be. Deep down, most people just want to be understood and have reason to trust whoever they are placing their bets and time on – face to face, but mostly online.
Don’t make things harder for them, make them feel good, and most of all, do not trick them, as it will most likely backfire.
More Resources:
- Ask An SEO: How To Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions In SERPs
- Brand Bias For Visibility In Search & LLMs: A Conversation With Stephen Kenwright
- SEO Trends 2026
Featured Image: Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock
