Via negativa
In short
Via negativa (“the negative way”) means improving something by removing rather than adding: a pointless rule, a meeting, a step in a process, a habit. The term comes from theology, where it described trying to say what God is through what God is not. Nassim Taleb used it in Antifragile (2012) as a general principle: we often know more reliably what to avoid than what to add. Recent research shows why the idea is worth recalling: when people want to improve something, they think by default about what to add and overlook what they could take away.
What it says
The core study. Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz (2021) published eight experiments in Nature on how people search for changes. Their conclusion: people search by default for transformations that add and, as a result, overlook those that subtract. Participants were less likely to identify an advantageous subtractive solution in three situations:
- when the task did not remind them they could remove things;
- when they had only one opportunity, rather than several, to notice that the additive strategy wasn’t working;
- when they were under a higher cognitive load.
One of the tasks used a Lego structure with a platform resting on a single piece in one corner. The platform could be stabilized by adding supporting pieces or, just as well, by removing the corner piece. The authors link the tendency to concrete problems: overloaded schedules, institutional red tape and damaging effects on the planet.
The 2025 replication. Fillon, Girandola, Bonnardel and Souchet (2025) repeated three of the experiments in a preregistered study with 477 adults in France. Participants proposed 1,155 additive ideas and only 297 subtractive ones. A simple reminder (“Remember that you can add things or take them away”) increased the share of people who proposed at least one subtractive idea. A second experiment showed that wording that mentioned only removal worked better than wording that mentioned removal first and then adding.
But not the same everywhere. Juvrud, Myers and Nyström (2024) repeated the Lego task and a grid-symmetry task in the US and Sweden, with adults and with 9–10-year-old children. The results were mixed. Among adults, the grid task, with neutral stimuli, showed no difference between adding and removing. In the Lego task, the preference for adding appeared only when mixed solutions, which both added and removed, were counted together with purely additive ones. Swedish adults used subtractive solutions more often than American ones, and children neglected subtraction at least as much as adults did. The authors’ conclusion: the tendency depends on the task, the culture and age, and may be less general than the original study suggested. They also flag a possible method issue: in the 2021 Lego task, the instruction mentioned “add” before “take away”.
Example
An example built for this text: a team complains that projects move slowly. The reflex is to add something: a new tool, a sync meeting, a weekly report. The subtractive question is different: what can we stop? A meeting whose notes nobody reads any more, an approval step that hasn’t rejected anything in a year, a report that everyone fills in and nobody uses.
How to apply it
The steps below are a practical approach we propose. The only thing tested directly is that an explicit reminder of removal increases the number of such ideas.
- Ask the question explicitly. Before adding something, ask “what could I take away?”. In the studies, exactly this kind of reminder increased subtractive ideas (Adams et al., 2021; Fillon et al., 2025). Wording that mentions only removal worked best.
- Don’t stop at the first idea. Adams et al. found that people noticed subtractive solutions more often when they had several opportunities to see that adding wasn’t working. Give yourself time for a second and a third option.
- Decide with a clear head. Under cognitive load, participants found subtractive solutions less often. Important decisions about what to cut are worth making when you aren’t overwhelmed.
- Take stock regularly. Your schedule, rules, subscriptions, the steps in a process: list them and ask, for each one, what would happen if it disappeared.
Limits and nuances
- How general it is remains debated. The 2025 replication confirms the tendency, but the 2024 study finds mixed results that depend on the task, culture and age. The effect seems real, but not universal.
- Lab tasks. Most of the evidence comes from simple tasks (Lego, grids, lists of ideas). The link to red tape or overloaded schedules is an extrapolation the authors propose, not a result they measured directly.
- Not every removal is good. The principle doesn’t say that removing is better than adding, only that removal is often forgotten as an option. Sometimes the right solution really is to add something.
- Taleb is a book, not a study. Using the term as a life principle comes from Taleb’s essay. The part tested empirically is only the tendency to overlook removal.
Sources
- Gabrielle S. Adams, Benjamin A. Converse, Andrew H. Hales, Leidy E. Klotz (2021). People systematically overlook subtractive changes
- Adrien Alejandro Fillon, Fabien Girandola, Nathalie Bonnardel, Lionel Souchet (2025). The Overlooking of Subtractive Changes: Replication and Extension to Stronger Cues and Social Norms
- Joshua Juvrud, Laurence Myers, Pär Nyström (2024). People overlook subtractive changes differently depending on age, culture, and task
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
See also: Circle of competence, Diminishing returns, Pareto principle