I noticed quite a stir among my friends recently. They were upset, outraged, frustrated! And where were these negative feelings coming from? Facebook once again decided to change!
People dislike change, and I’m not just speaking about changes in Facebook. Throughout life we go through many changes — some positive, some negative. The problem is you’re more likely to remember a change if it resulted in a negative outcome. This is because when your goals are interrupted (wasting time at work while reconnecting with friends is a goal to some people), the feelings that result will likely be negative because of a feeling of helplessness or loss of control. Negative events elicit a stronger emotional and physiological response than positive because they signal that an action needs to be taken, which isn’t true for positive.1
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. If we were all still living as hunter/gatherers and everything was going well, there was a heard of elk nearby and plenty of fresh water, why would we want change? In our current times though, changes can often be positive. If your favorite store stops carrying the things you like to eat, you start shopping at a new store that might even be cheaper.
Try to think of the last change Facebook made before this week. Can you even remember what it was?
I’m on Facebook a lot, and I think it might have been the picture-viewing feature, but I can’t be sure. Just like every other modification, people were so angry with it they vowed never to use Facebook again, then logged on an hour later banging their heads against the keyboard in frustration and resignation.
Now I can’t even remember what the old way was like, and I doubt I’m the only one , and the same goes for every update that has been made to the site. In fact, if Facebook was still the same as when I started using it, I probably wouldn’t use it anymore.
So you can calm down about the “new” Facebook. You can stop sending around useless petitions to return Facebook to how it was.
And you can also use the knowledge that no matter how terrible the Facebook change seemed to be when it was made, you quickly got used to it, perhaps even started to like it, and applied it to your life, which, take it from me, is a lot easier if you don’t stress about it.
As sung by David Bowie, “Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes”.
Footnotes
1. Taylor, Shelley. “Asymmetrical Effects of Positive and Negative Events: The Mobilization-Minimization Hypothesis.” Psychological Bulletin. 110.1 (1991): 67-85.
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