There's a reason I tend to remember the hurt

I have never forgotten the name of the ninth-grade P.E. teacher who announced my height as 4 feet 11 and one-half inches.

I can’t, however, recall the name of the teacher who insisted I be promoted into her honors English class earlier that same school year. 

This contrast strikes me as not just odd, but telling. The embarrassment of having my height read aloud was fairly mild, and the recognition and encouragement that English teacher provided was, in retrospect, a far more significant landmark in my life. It was – I think – the first time I felt like I was a good student. It also concerned my writing ability, which is the skill I’ve always valued most professionally yet I choose to focus on the negative yet I continue to drone on that sweat-suited shrew of a gym teacher.

This is an example of what I’ve always believed is an Eeyore-like flaw in my outlook on life. I’m so exceptionally sensitive to anything even slightly bad that has happened to me that I look past all of the kindness and generosity that has been bestowed upon me. This may not explain why I hold onto grudges for so long — which I do believe is the defining characteristic of a grudge — but it does show how they burrow their way into my mind to begin with.

I’m going to pause here to acknowledge the fact that one reason I’ve continued to tell the story about the P.E. is that it consistently get a laugh. It is also self-deprecating and somewhat endearing to emphasize just how small I was as a freshman while only an asshole goes around telling people he was such a smart 15-year-old someone insisted he needed more of a challenge.

That’s a cognitive distinction, though, suggesting that I am actively choosing which story will make me look better or seem funnier. That’s not the case here. I’m not deciding to withhold the English teacher’s name. I legitimately do not remember it, and going a step further, I think that this tendency to fixate on the negative while ignoring the positive is an example of an enduring problem I have.

But what if this actually ties into something deeper than just my outlook or attitude? What if it was evidence of a predisposition that’s actually wired into a fairly primitive part of our brains, causing us to have a stronger reaction to negative events than we do to positive ones? Because that is a thing, you know. A tendency that social scientists have studied for nearly 50 years. It’s even got a name: loss aversion. 

The first time I remember coming across this concept was 4 years ago while reading “Thinking in Bets,” which is a book about decision-making. It’s written by Annie Duke a former professional poker player. She retired in 2012, earned a PhD in physics psychology and now studies, practices and coaches people on how to make better decisions. I absolutely love her work.

Duke pointed out that in poker, players who lose a significant hand or series of hands can become rattled to the point they begin making odd, maybe even desperate decisions. In fact, the tendency for going haywire is so common there’s a term for it: going on tilt. This occurs when a player suffers a loss that destabilizes their decision-making. Often, they start taking more risks than they should. In other instances, they may stop taking risks at all. Neither is a good approach for poker, but what is fascinating is that this tendency to go on tilt is not nearly as pronounced after equally large victories.

Why would losses have a more pronounced impact on decision-making than wins? Duke connected this tendency among poker players to the unconscious bias that was first theorized by cognitive scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. As Kahneman summarized quite elegantly: “The response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.”

What if that same principal holds true when the loss – or damage – is emotional as opposed to fiscal?

Let’s go back to freshman me.

Having my shortness memorialized at 4-11.5 was the final act in a fairly difficult school year. After going to a small Catholic school from first through eighth grade, I had enrolled at Mazama, a public high school. In the first month, a senior I didn’t know had ordered me to use my nose to push a penny down the hallway, racing another freshman forced to do the same. I “won” but in my haste, I had rubbed my forehead raw on the tile floor. I had a scab between my eyebrows for a full week. I was self-conscious of my clothes, the lack of hair under my arms and the fact I still had a newspaper route. It was – like it is for so many kids that age – a very awkward time in life and the fact that my mom remarried in January, only 16 months after my father died, probably didn’t help.

However, that year wasn’t all bad. I had friends. I tried out for the JV baseball team. I didn’t eat lunch alone, and while I did have to push a penny down the hallway, later that week another senior loaded me into his truck along with several other freshmen I considered “cool” and took us to Pizza Hut for lunch. At the start of that year, there was some uncertainty on what caliber of student I was given that my previous school was too small for tiers or tracks. I was placed in the intermediate English class. I took creative writing as an elective. It was after I turned in our first batch of assignments that the teacher of that creative writing class initiated what turned out to be a promotion into freshman honors English, which she also taught.

Looking at it objectively, the promotion in English was much more consequential, providing significant validation about my proficiency in a discipline that I continue to pursue professionally. The fact that I was really short back then is really just a funny quirk in my biography yet I can recall with striking clarity not just that teacher’s name, but the type of nylon sweatsuits she wore.

Now, memory is a fickle thing. It is not dictated by the importance of an event nor its long-term impact. Who knows why we remember certain things and are unable to recall others. I have spent my entire life unsure on how to spell gaurd … I mean … guard.

However, if – generally speaking – humans are more likely to remember negative experiences than correspondingly positive ones, it would explain some things about my tendency to get stuck on negative experiences, and this would absolutely have an impact on my tendency to hold a grudge. After all, memory might be the single most important component of a grudge because you can’t resent what you can’t recall.

This is a hard thesis to test, though, primarily because it’s impossible to determine the positive equivalent of a negative emotion. The closest we can come is to find something more objective. Like money.

And we do know, from repeated studies, that when humans lose a designated amount of money, it has a larger impact on their decision-making than if they win that same amount.

In fact, it’s not just humans. This tendency has been replicated even more recently in studies where the subjects were brown capuchin monkeys who learned to exchange tokens for grapes. I’m dead serious. The scientists in charge of the experiment established a market for the monkeys and then started messing around with the amount of grapes they provided to see how the monkeys reacted. Here’s the TED talk by Laurie Santos, a psychology professor from Yale who oversaw the experiment:

Turns out the monkeys had a stronger reaction to getting fewer grapes than they expected than they did when they received more grapes than they expected. When they felt ripped off, they remembered. You could almost say the monkeys held a grudge against the dudes whom they deemed stingy except I don’t want to go that far yet. The scientists were studying the rationality of decision-making, not resentment or hostility. I simply want to introduce the possibility that -- on average -- we have a bias against losses, and that this bias is so deeply ingrained in our neurological circuitry that we share it with animals who are our very distant ancestors, and by very distant, I’m talking 35 million years ago.

The question of why we possess this particular tendency leads directly into evolutionary biology and the fact that avoiding the loss of resources (or reputation) was likely more lethal to our primal ancestors than the failure to maximize gains. A caveman who played it safe and killed one small animal to eat instead of trying to bag three was less likely to die than one who — in his haste to kill additional meals — let someone else make off with the one he did kill. 

For our current discussion, it doesn’t really matter why we react more strongly to a loss than a win. The fact is that we do, and in some ways, I find this reassuring because for a long time, I’ve seen my tendency to hold onto negative memories as a specifically personal failing. A flawed perspective on life that results in me dutifully storing the name of the teacher who made me feel short instead of remembering the name of the one who encouraged my writing as if I were a young “Good Will Hunting.”

But maybe it’s much more subtle than that, and instead of evidence that I’m ugly on the inside it’s more like the residue of a tendency that was important many millions of years ago but not so much now. In other words, it’s not something that can be fixed, but rather recognized, and while I didn’t catalog my ninth-grade English teacher’s name in my memory banks as carefully as I did that of my P.E. teacher, there’s nothing me stopping me from going to my yearbook and looking it up.

I’m pretty sure the teacher was Paulann Peterson, but honestly, even after looking at pictures I’m not certain. It was a long time ago.