Believing the World Is Bad Can Hurt Your Relationships

A study of couples finds costs to seeing the world as bad.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Key points

• Sometimes world events make it tempting to see the world as a worse place.
• A new study of 159 couples finds that, some days, people give in to that temptation.
• On those days, both partners, not just the one who gives in, sees their partner and relationship as worse.

A polish Jew named Sarah once told me this story: At the beginning of World War II, when she was a child, her family was sent to concentration camps. Over the next few years, they went from camp to camp. One by one, family members died. Finally, she ended up, alone, in Auschwitz, on Christmas Eve, the last Christmas of the war (1944), and was sick and in the infirmary, such as it was.

She remembers lying on a cot next to another young girl, also sick. They looked at each other, told each other Merry Christmas, and held hands. They kept holding hands, through the night, waiting for Christmas morning.

And then Sarah said, “That is the day I realized that the world was so good and so full of beauty, that nothing, and no one, not even the Nazis, could ever stamp it out.”

When difficult world events happen, hope can get slippery.

We are supposed to care about world events and world progress. That’s good. But, when bad things happen, it's easy to see the world as not quite the place you thought you knew: as uglier, meaner, more dangerous, and more out of control.

During those times, many resist the urge to see the world as too terrible—at least most days. This is partly because we sense a personal cost. Recent psychological research seems to back this up. When humans see the world as a bad place, our own wellbeing can suffer. One study tied the belief the world is a bad place to depression and suicide attempts, as well as not liking your job and being worse at it (Clifton & Meindl, 2020).

What researchers haven’t known (until now) is that the cost of seeing the world as a bad place isn’t just personal, it’s interpersonal too.

Researchers Ed Lemay and Jennifer Cutri at the University of Maryland tracked 159 couples (318 people) over 14 days. Each day, couples recorded their thoughts and feelings about many things, including their relationship satisfaction, the positive and negative qualities they felt their partners were showing, and how much they believed that day that the world was a good place.

Ed and Jenna found that people can and do make decisions on some days to see the world differently. This was a major finding for research nerds like me. We’ve long known that these world beliefs—often called “primal world beliefs” by researchers, or “primals” for short—can be quite stable over time (Ludwig et al., 2023). But though the average is stable, it turns out that people can still vary a bit from day to day.

What happens when we give in to seeing the world as a terrible place, even just for a day?

Ed and Jenna discovered that on days that one partner (say “Jack”) sees the world as worse, Jack also sees his relationship with Jill (his proverbial partner) as an unsatisfactory relationship. Not only that, Jack reports harsher opinions on a range of Jill’s personal qualities, and this lowered opinion of Jill’s personal qualities largely explains (“mediates” in researcher terms) why Jack no longer appreciates his relationship with Jill as much.

But Jack’s eroded belief the world is good also seems to impact Jill’s opinion about the relationship too, whether or not Jill’s worldview changes. Remarkably, when Jack sees the world as a worse place, Jill too becomes less happy in the relationship, and also sees Jack as less of a good guy, reporting that Jack’s traits aren’t so great either.

Adopting a more negative view of the world, even for one day, seems to hurt our most important relationships.

But Ed and Jenna would be the first to tell you that this is just correlational data. For instance, when I first heard about this study, I told Ed this was probably just mood fluctuation and self-esteem. After all, on days when you feel happy, surely the world looks brighter and you feel better about your primary relationships, right?

Ed shook his head, “We looked at that.” Every day of the study, Ed and Jenna also measured daily self-esteem and daily wellbeing. The results were clear.

Daily changes in self-esteem or wellbeing didn’t explain the findings.

Instead, the best explanation Ed and Jenna have—though far from certain—is this:

For some time, many researchers have had the working theory that all primal world beliefs are stable lenses that we use to interpret reality and that daily fluctuation in primal world belief scores was mostly just measurement error. But Ed and Jenna’s groundbreaking work is the first evidence that however one chooses to see the world for a day, one seems to interpret their entire life—including their spouse—through that lens, seeing their partner as more lazy, less kind, less competent, and so forth, for that day.

Takeaway: We have a choice to make, every day, and making Sarah's choice is probably better for our relationships.

This research suggests that, whether we recognize it or not, we all have a choice to make, every day: we can choose to see the world as a better place, or a worse place.

Sarah’s story shows this too. If a historian had to guess the saddest place in the entire 20^th century, there’s a decent chance they’d say Auswhitz, Christmas, 1944. Even in that dark place, Sarah had a choice. She was not forced to see the world as terrible.

Today, we have a choice too.

This study also provides new motivation: our loved ones. We can keep a positive worldview, not just for us, but for them too.

For instance, we can remember that, throughout history, there have been times of progress, and times of decline, even peril. These times never last forever, and most generations face them. People, even large groups, can make terrible mistakes. This does not mean all humans are evil. It does mean that humans are imperfect.

And, as Sarah says, even during times of great evil, the good in the world is far too great to be snuffed out.

But occasionally all of us will still have bad days where we give into negative worldviews. That’s ok. At least now we can also be on the lookout for how that might impact important people in our lives and find other ways to hold them close.