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Hi everyone.
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Gosh, I wish I could dance, but I can't,
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and you really don't want me to.
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So instead I thought I would talk a little today about how people think.
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I'm fascinated by this question.
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I'm a social psychologist,
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which basically means I'm a professional people watcher.
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So, this is what I do;
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I try to figure out how humans think
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and how we might be able to think better.
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Here's something I noticed a few years ago about how I seem to think;
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here's a typical week in my life,
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which usually seems to revolve entirely around publishing papers.
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So here I am,
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at maximum of my artistic abilities as a stick figure,
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going along at baseline,
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and a paper gets accepted.
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I get this rush, this blip of happiness,
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and then I'm back to baseline by about lunch time.
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(Laughter)
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A few days later, a paper might get rejected,
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and that feels pretty awful.
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And I wait for that blip to end,
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but somehow I just can't stop thinking about it.
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Here's the craziest part:
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even if another paper gets accepted the next day, well, that's nice,
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but somehow I can't get that pesky rejection out of my head.
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So, what is going on here?
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Why does a failure seem to stick in our minds
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so much longer than a success?
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Together with my colleague Amber Boydstun in the Political Science Department,
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I started thinking about this question,
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this question of, "do our minds get stuck in the negatives?"
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We all know intuitively
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that there are different ways of thinking about things.
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The same glass, the saying goes can be seen as half-full or half-empty.
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There's a lot of research in the social sciences showing
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that depending on how you describe the glass to people,
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as half-full or half-empty,
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it changes how they feel about it.
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So if you describe the glass as half-full, this is called the gain frame,
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because you're focusing on what's gained,
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then people like it.
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But if you describe the same glass as half-empty, a loss frame,
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then people don't like it.
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But we wondered what happens when you try to switch
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from thinking about it one way to thinking about it another way.
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Can people shift back and forth,
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or do they get stuck in one way of thinking about it?
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Does one of these labels, in other words, tend to stick more in the mind?
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Well, to investigate this question, we conducted a simple experiment.
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We told participants in our experiment about a new surgical procedure,
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and we randomly assigned them to one of two conditions.
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For participants in the first condition, the first group,
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we described the surgical procedure in terms of gains;
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we said it had a 70% success rate.
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For participants in the second group,
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we described the procedure in terms of losses;
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we said it had a 30% failure rate.
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So it's the exact same procedure,
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we're just focusing people's attention on the part of the glass that's full,
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or the part of the glass that's empty.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, people like the procedure
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when it's described as having a 70% success rate,
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and they don't like it
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when it's described as having a 30% failure rate.
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But then we added a twist:
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we told participants in the first group,
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"You know, you could think of this as a 30% failure rate."
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And now they don't like it anymore; they've changed their minds.
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We told participants in the second group,
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"You know, you could think of this as a 70% success rate",
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but unlike the first group, they stuck with their initial opinion;
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they seemed to be stuck in the initial loss frame that they saw
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at the beginning of the study.
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We conducted another experiment.
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This time we told participants
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about the current governor of an important state
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who is running for re-election against his opponent.
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We again had two groups of participants,
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and we described the current governor's track record to them in one of two ways.
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We said that when the current governor took office,
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statewide budget cuts were expected to affect of about 10,000 jobs,
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and then half of the participants read
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that under the current governor's leadership
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40% of these jobs had been saved.
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They like the current governor; they think he is doing a great job.
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The rest of the participants read
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that under the current governor's leadership,
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60% of these jobs had been lost,
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and they don't like the current governor; they think he's doing a terrible job.
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But then, once more, we added a twist.
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For participants in the first group,
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we reframed the information in terms of losses,
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and now they didn't like the current governor anymore.
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For participants in the second group,
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we reframed the information in terms of gains,
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but just like in the first study, this didn't seem to matter.
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People in this group still didn't like the current governor.
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So notice what this means.
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Once the loss frame gets in there, it sticks.
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People can't go back to thinking about jobs saved
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once they thought about jobs lost.
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So in both of these scenarios actually
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the current governor gets ousted in favor of his opponent.
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At this point we were getting curious: why does this happen?
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Could it be that it's actually mentally harder for people
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to convert from losses to gains
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than it is for them to go from gains to losses?
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So we conducted the third study
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to test how easily people could covert from one frame to another.
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This time we told participants,
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"Imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease
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and six hundred lives are at stake."
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We asked participants in one group,
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"If a hundred lives are saved, how many will be lost?"
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And we asked participants in the other group,
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"If a hundred lives are lost, how many will be saved?"
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So everyone just has to calculate
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600 minus 100, and come up with the answer of 500
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but whereas people in one group have to convert from gains to losses
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in order to do that,
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people in the second group have to convert from losses to gains.
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We timed how long it took them to solve this simple math problem,
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and what we found was that
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when people had to convert from gains to losses,
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they could solve the problem quite quickly;
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it took them about 7 seconds on average.
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But when they had to convert from losses to gains,
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well now it took them far longer, almost 11 seconds.
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So this suggests that once we think about something as a loss,
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that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our heads
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and to resist our attempts to change it.
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What I take away from this research and from related research
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is that our view of the world has a fundamental tendency
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to tilt toward the negative.
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It's pretty easy to go from good to bad, but far harder to shift from bad to good.
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We literally have to work harder to see the upside of things.
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And this matters.
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So, think about the economy.
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Here's economic well-being from 2007 to 2010.
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You can see it tanked, just like we all remember,
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and then by late 2010 it has recovered by most objective measures.
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But here's consumer confidence over the same time period.
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You can see it tanks right along with the economy,
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but then it seems to get stuck.
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Instead of rebounding with the economy itself,
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consumers seem to be psychologically stuck back there in the recession.
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So oddly then, it may take more effort to change our minds
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about how the economy is doing then to change the economy itself.
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On the more personal level, what this research means to me
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is that you have to work to see the up-side.
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Literally, this takes work, this takes effort.
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And you can practice this; you can train your mind to do this better.
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There's research out at UC Davis,
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showing that just writing for a few minutes each day
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about things that you're grateful for
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can dramatically boost your happiness and well-being,
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and even your health.
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We can also rehearse good news and share it with others.
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We tend to think, right, that misery loves company,
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that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions,
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that we'll feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day was.
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And so we talk, and we talk, and we talk about the boss who’s driving us crazy,
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and that friend who never called us back,
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and that meeting at work
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where every little thing that could go wrong, did.
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But we forget to talk about the good stuff.
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And yet, that's exactly where our minds need the most practice.
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So, my husband who has this disconcerting habit
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of listening to what I say other people should do,
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and then pointing out
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that, technically speaking, I'm a person, too,
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(Laughter)
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has taken to listening to me for about two minutes
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on days when I come home all grumpy and complaining about everything,
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and he listens, and he says,
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"Okay, but what happened today that was good?"
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So I tell him about the student who came up to me after class
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with this really interesting, insightful question,
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and I tell him about the friend who emailed me out of the blue
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this morning just to say, "hello".
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And somewhere in the telling, I start to smile,
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and I start to think that maybe my day was pretty decent after all.
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I think we can also work in our communities
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to focus on the upside.
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We can be more aware that bad tends to stick.
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One mean comment can stick with somebody all day, all week even,
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and bad tends to propagate itself, right?
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Somebody snaps at you and you snap back, and you snap at the next guy, too.
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But what if the next time somebody snapped at you,
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you forgave them?
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What if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress,
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you left her an extra large tip?
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Our minds may be built to look for negative information
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and to hold on to it,
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but we can also retrain our minds if we put some effort into it
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and start to see that the glass
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may be a little more full than we initially thought.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)