NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. We pride ourselves on the good things we do for partners and friends, but what really matters is what we don’t do. Avoiding bad is far more important than doing good, as Roy Baumeister and I point out in this Atlantic article discussing studies tracking married couples. It’s an excerpt from our new book, The Power of Bad, which notes that Anthony Trollope figured out this negativity effect in marriage long before social scientists, in his 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right.