The Anna Karenina principle explains our sad society

The below research is both very interesting, and also demonstrates a principle I've observed through my life, but don't remember having seen expressed anywhere. 

Differentiation drives the erosion of positivity on social media

(found from: Kevin Lewis via Tyler Cowan)

Full article via preprint

Why are discussions in social media so often negative? Essentially, negativity is selected for since: 

1) everyone is trying to stand out and get attention

2):

it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments

Even if you try to be positive, you eventually run out of new nice things to say. You either heel-turn to the negative, or someone else does, and gets more attention, drowning you out.

I find this interesting in two respects: First, I agree with the finding about social media. Second, in my experience this effect is broadly true beyond the internet (and before it):

Journalism skews negative because it is easier to capture your attention with the bad vs. the good (in part due to loss aversion).

This is my experience in the domain of art as well.  Most high-status books and stories deal with negative themes and deeply flawed characters. There is a basic assumption that somehow the negative has more artistic value than the positive, and perhaps the positive is necessarily bland and uniform. e.g.:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

In my experience, this is wrong. It is, however, true that it's *easier* to come up with specific negative art.  Apparently this is captured in a principle taken from the quote above,  The "Anna Karenina principle."

More generally stated, for agents of any sort, the agent would like the world to be in a small subset of state space. Thus positive states have lower entropy: there are fewer of them.  There are many more ways to be unhappy.  Thus it's easier to come up with novel negative states vs. positive ones.

Therefore the negative slant to our art represents a culture of laziness in our institutions. Part of this is the result of selection: unhappy artists succeed more easily, rise to levels of authority, and assume that anyone who does not share their negative view and aesthetics are bland or unsophisticated.

It's sad, though. Such elites may believe all happy families are alike because they have never truly understood even one happy person. 

The implications are big: a society led by such sad people becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Of course, once we realize the phallacy, we can fight against it.