Ignore the Algorithms

The Wiring

There is nothing wrong with you for noticing the bad more than the good. Your brain was built for it. The negativity bias — the tendency to register, process, and recall negative events with more weight than positive ones — is one of the most well-replicated findings in cognitive science. It is not a character flaw. It is an evolutionary feature from a time when missing a threat was lethal and missing an opportunity was merely inconvenient.

If a tiger is behind you and you don't notice, you die. If a piece of fruit is above you and you miss it, you go slightly hungry. Natural selection was not interested in balance. It was interested in survival. So it built brains that are exquisitely tuned to threat, to danger, to the thing that might go wrong. And it built those brains in you, in your colleagues, in the people making decisions about what to show you on a screen.

The platforms know this. They did not invent the negativity bias — they just found out how to live inside it. This is not a fringe view. The economics of attention are straightforward. Outrage, fear, and conflict produce more engagement than kindness, gratitude, and quiet decency. So that is what the feed shows you. Not because the world is full of outrage, fear, and conflict. But because those things make you stay longer.

What the Platforms Built

In January and February 2026, 105 people told us what they think about technology's relationship with human kindness. The result was not ambiguous. When asked whether modern technology platforms reward the positive qualities that humans value most, 59% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Only 6 out of 105 agreed. Not a single person strongly agreed.

That last number is worth sitting with. On a five-point agreement scale, in a sample of 105 people, zero gave the top rating. In most surveys, even the most unpopular positions pick up a handful of strong supporters. This one didn't. The verdict on what algorithms reward is, for this group, essentially settled.

This is not a call to delete social media. It is a call to understand what has been built, and why — so that you can choose what to do with that understanding. The platforms are not malicious. They are optimised. And what they are optimised for is not you at your most human.

What the Research Actually Found

Between January and February 2026, 105 people answered a question that sounds simple but turned out to be surprisingly revealing: what do you most associate with brilliance in other people? The qualities that came back were not what most leadership programmes optimise for. They were not the qualities that trend. 54% put kindness and empathy first. 48% put creativity and innovation last.

Not marginally last. Actively, deliberately last. When asked to rank six attributes — kindness, integrity, humility, positivity, courage, creativity — almost half of the people we spoke to pushed creativity to the bottom. Not because they don't value it, but because when forced to choose what makes a human genuinely brilliant, they reach for something different. Something quieter. Something the feed never shows you.

The top three — kindness, integrity, humility — are all relational. They are all about how a person treats others and themselves. The bottom three — positivity, courage, creativity — are all about what a person projects or produces. The leadership industry spends most of its energy on the bottom three. The research suggests people care most about the top three.

The Paradox

Here is the finding that sits at the centre of this argument. 89% of the people who took this survey say most people they know are generally good and kind. 86% agree that everyone has the capacity to be a brilliant human. 55% say they encounter more small acts of kindness than selfish behaviour in daily life. And yet 87% also agree that we give more attention to negative behaviour than positive.

The world most people live in, day to day, is mostly kind. The world most people are told they live in is mostly hostile. And — here is the bit that makes this a research finding rather than a platitude — most people know both things are true at the same time and cannot fully explain the gap.

Twenty-two respondents simultaneously reported encountering more positive behaviour than negative in daily life, and also said that a negative interaction stays with them longer than a positive one. Their lived experience is kind. Their memory of it is not. The bias is caught in the act, inside a single dataset.

45% say a negative interaction stays with them longer than a positive one, compared to 36% who say the positive lasts longer. The world is kinder than most people's emotional memories of it suggest. The feed makes this worse. The negativity bias built into your brain does the rest.

The 81% Finding

81% of the people in this research said a small, ordinary act of kindness made their day better in the previous week. This is not a rare event. This is not exceptional behaviour. This is the texture of most people's lives, most of the time. And it almost never trends.

Of those acts, 83% cost the giver nothing. No money. No special skill. No extraordinary effort. The activation energy required to make someone's day better, it turns out, is essentially zero. A word. A pause. A moment of attention in a meeting when everyone else was checking their phone. These are the things that make the difference. These are the things the algorithm cannot find, because it cannot measure quiet.

This is not a moral argument. It is a perceptual one. The point is not that people should be kinder. The data suggests they already are. The point is that the infrastructure we have built to understand the world has a systematic bias against showing us what is actually there. And once you see that clearly, you cannot unsee it.

What Ignoring the Algorithms Means in Practice

This is not a call to leave social media. Jonathan Griffiths is not suggesting the answer is a digital detox, a news blackout, or a retreat from the world as it is. The call is simpler and harder than that: notice what you have been trained to look past.

The colleague who quietly made space for someone in a difficult meeting. The manager who listened when they had three other things to do. The person who remembered something small that mattered to someone else, and mentioned it. These moments cost nothing and they change everything. They are the qualities that define brilliant humans. They are also, as the evidence is increasingly clear about, the qualities that define high-performing workplaces.

Most of those moments will never appear in anyone's feed. Most of the people who created them will never be on a stage or a podcast or a bestseller list. 86% of the people who shaped this research's respondents most significantly are unknown beyond their own family or small community. Brilliance is overwhelmingly local, domestic, and quiet. The algorithms are looking in the wrong direction.

The Workplace Argument

The qualities algorithms suppress are the same qualities that drive performance in organisations. Gallup's research across 2.7 million employees links engagement — driven by being seen, heard, and valued — to 23% higher profitability and 81% lower absenteeism. Google's Project Aristotle, studying what made its highest-performing teams different, concluded that psychological safety — the sense that it is safe to be human with one another — was the single most important factor. Amy Edmondson's Harvard research on psychological safety has been replicating that finding across sectors for twenty years.

Kindness, empathy, and the quiet behaviours that never trend are not soft outcomes. They are structural inputs. The research that matters most to your organisation's performance points directly at the things the feed has trained you to overlook. The full commercial evidence is on the Business Case page. The argument is more robust than most people expect.