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# Negativity Bias Identified Long Before It was Identified (11/18/2020)
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/52318/
- Published: 2020-10-18T15:22:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-06T13:20:54.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Briefly, #wpChunk, Science

> The minds of men always dwell more on bad luck. They accept ordinary prosperity as a matter of course. Misfortunes arrest their attention and remain in their memory.

> William Graham Sumner, *Folkways A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals*

### Just one of the hundreds of examples of tradition identifying psychological discoveries centuries before modern psychiatry did. If you want a treasure trove of such things, read Catholic contemplatives, the Stoics, and the Hesychasts.

### (Sumner, btw, lived from 1840 to 1910, so there is overlap with William James, whose *Principles of Psychology* (1890) is arguably the beginning of modern psychiatry.)