Rozin & Royzman 2001 (PSPR) — negativity bias / negativity dominance; bad weighs more than the algebraic sum of equivalent goods

Claim: Rozin and Royzman (2001) document four ways negative information dominates positive:

• Negative potency — negative events are subjectively stronger than equivalent positive events
• Steeper negative gradients — negativity grows more rapidly with proximity (in space or time) than positivity does
• Negativity dominance — combinations of positive and negative evaluate more negatively than the algebraic sum
• Negative differentiation — negative entities are perceived in more varied terms

Negativity dominance is the load-bearing finding for Candid.

Source: Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). "Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion." Personality and Social Psychology Review 5(4): 296–320. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2

Confidence: Verified.

For Candid: A GC who has had three positive interactions with marketing vendors and one bad one will, in retrieval, weight the bad one above the algebraic sum of the three positives. This is not irrational — it is the documented baseline pattern of human cognition, with a plausible evolutionary basis (false negatives carry asymmetric fitness costs).

Implication: case study volume does not linearly counteract one prior bad experience. The integrity-violation channel ([[kim-ferrin-cooper-dirks-2004-competence-vs-integrity-trust-repair]]) and structural-commitment signals ([[rule-diagnose-prior-vendor-failure-as-competence-or-integrity]]) do the load-bearing work, not aggregated positive signals.