As you scroll through your social media feed, chances are that you come across information about the world, the existing problems, and why you should care about them. As a generation that is constantly looking for updates, we tend to act as active consumers of news. However, have you noticed that almost all the news is negative?
According to the peace researcher John Galtung, “if a newspaper came out once every 50 years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.”
Yet, we find celebrity gossip and political scandals making the first page every morning. We find ourselves surrounded by negative news daily. What is it about this news that attracts us as audiences?
We are as connected as ever, and this means that we watch news about wars fought out in the west, and also local robberies in our neighbourhood. Our tendency to overlook good news and focus on the bad can be explained evolutionarily. Early humans’ survival depended heavily on dodging danger. As we keep a lookout for danger, chances are that we respond to them as well, for survival. This suggests that as we evolved, our modern brains’ preference for negativity has been harnessed to keep our attention on negative news.
Cognitive biases, systematic errors in our thinking process, act as shortcuts that help us make an inference, without extensive deliberation and/or reflective judgement. An example of this is the negativity bias wherein negative responses tend to be registered more readily. This bias, that is often taken advantage of by media houses, leads us to believe that the content around us is inherently negative therefore, impacting our mental health. As pointed out by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the bias also impacts decisions wherein, negative news often weighs more in the decision making process than positive news. Since we are on a lookout for negative news, news agencies may focus on it and thereby, draw our attention to it.
Further, Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, explained that people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are recovered from memory. Known as the availability bias, this may be influenced by the extent of negative news coverage by the media. Moreover, frequently mentioned topics populate the minds of people even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media chooses to report corresponds to what may be in the minds of the public. Therefore, it is important to understand that just because the information was readily available, it may not represent the true state of events.
Further, our brain creates a narrative between facts, and finds it appropriate to drop certain facts that do not fit our version of the story, to make it dramatic. Through this narrative bias, we see the world as stories. For example, in a particular news segment, a journalist weaved a story of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wherein she was portrayed as a person who is a bigot against the white race. This was achieved using snippets of her congressional hearings and her election speeches.
These biases, in conjunction with the internet being an endless realm of information, lead to people being more equipped than ever to find sources of information that may seem credible and corroborate their existing points of views. This confirmation bias enables people to perceive new information such that it aligns well with their existing beliefs. This is also a possible explanation as to why people refuse to wear masks even during the COVID-19 pandemic - some sources of information may provide them with ample justification to not wear masks.
As we continue seeking negative news, we should also understand its possible effects. Research shows that negative news incites negatively charged emotions in its viewers. The negative news generates negative feelings such as anxiety, which leads to other negative emotions. Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and popular science author, argues that consumers of negative news may become anxious and feel helpless about the world, leading to further hostility and other negative emotions. Studies show that being anxious generates a predisposition to selectively look at threatening material, especially those that match the current topics of worry. These negative mood states may facilitate accessing the memories related to these particular moods. This suggests that there is a vicious cycle where negative news leads to negative moods which in turn leads back to negative news.
A study also found that many people who view catastrophic events (such as terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and natural disasters) repeated over and over on the television develop post traumatic stress disorder-like (PTSD-like) symptoms, even though they had no direct experience of the catastrophe.
News agencies leave no stone unturned to package content in a way that attracts the audience. With an increase in soft news items on television along with tabloidisation of newspapers, journalists maintain institutional objectives to live up to certain expectations and retain employment. Therefore, reporters and editors are pressured to highlight specific topics (like crime) and use attractive formats (like pictures or human reactions) to increase the audience’s attention.
Put simply, plane crashes make the news, whereas car crashes (which kills far more people) almost never do. Pinker further observed that “many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving.”
A few research-backed ways may help us absorb important information while avoiding its negative effects are: making a conscious effort to redirect our attention to pleasant news and becoming active seekers of information rather than passive receivers; turning off news when you feel angry or upset; subscribing to authentic news sources (more than one); consuming news mindfully instead of mindlessly; and understanding the effects of the aforementioned biases to become self-aware, and take steps to monitor news intake habits.
The news around us does not seem to be turning positive anytime soon. But if we look at the big picture, we see poverty has dramatically decreased (75% in 1950 and less than 10% in 2015). We see how the life expectancy of people is on the rise and maternal mortality on the decline. People smoke less than they did in 1955 and many countries today live in a democracy. More students are able to attend school and access to the internet is on the rise. There is a lot of positive news to look forward to, just don’t let yourselves be fully swayed by negative news alone.
Parvathi Sajiv
