{"id":621434,"date":"2023-03-24T09:48:39","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T14:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/24\/why-the-news-is-so-negative-and-what-we-can-do-about-it\/"},"modified":"2023-03-24T09:48:39","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T14:48:39","slug":"why-the-news-is-so-negative-and-what-we-can-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/24\/why-the-news-is-so-negative-and-what-we-can-do-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the news is so negative \u2014 and what we can do about it"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Part of <\/em>Against Doomerism<\/strong><\/em><\/a> from <\/em>The Highlight<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Vox\u2019s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Broadcast News<\/em>, the movie that made me want to be a journalist, the protagonist Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) has a routine every morning. At an appointed time, she sits and weeps profusely for a minute. When the minute\u2019s done, she wipes her face and goes about her day without showing outward signs of sadness.<\/p>\n

Journalists have always been a fairly morose bunch<\/a>, and the news they produce reflects that. Communications scholars<\/a> have found that across many years and countries, coverage of political topics tends to more often be conveyed in a negative or cynical tone rather than a positive one; one study<\/a> in the mid-2000s found that about half of US, German, Italian, and Austrian campaign coverage conveyed bad news, while as little as 6 percent conveyed good news. By some measures, the situation is deteriorating; a recent study<\/a> found that the \u201cproportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness\u201d grew markedly in the US between 2000 and 2019.<\/p>\n

Some news consumers have surrendered to the phenomenon and find themselves hooked on \u201cdoomscrolling,\u201d<\/a> in journalist Karen Ho\u2019s memorable term, proceeding between articles asking if the war in Ukraine could be World War III<\/a>, or whether another world-destabilizing pandemic<\/a> could be on the way, or if we\u2019ve already passed key climate tipping points<\/a>. At least some news consumers aren\u2019t too happy about the situation. An international survey from Oxford\u2019s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism<\/a> last year found that in almost every country surveyed, trust in media is falling, and more people are saying they\u2019re avoiding news. Why? Because, respondents say, it \u201chas a negative effect on their mood.\u201d<\/p>\n

So \u2026 why are we like this? Are we journalists just a miserable lot who insist on spreading our neuroses to the rest of the world? Are readers, despite their protestations to the contrary, likelier to click on news that\u2019s negative or dire?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s, of course, both, and the supply- and demand-side reasons might come from the same source. Humans, it turns out, have what social psychologists call a \u201cnegativity bias\u201d: We tend to pay more attention to bad-seeming information than good-seeming information. That could be a root factor for why the news is so goddamned depressing. That\u2019s what we\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n

Negativity bias, explained<\/h3>\n

One of social psychologists\u2019 greatest passions is scouring human behavior for its many failures of rationality and perception, the systematic biases that push us off track. \u201cNegativity bias,\u201d the tendency for negative information and experiences to overwhelm the positive, kept coming up. As early as 1967, psychologist Marjorie Richey and co-authors<\/a> concluded that university students, given paragraphs describing a stranger\u2019s personality, were influenced more by negative descriptions than positive ones. In 1982, Teresa Amabile and Ann Glazebrook<\/a> proposed that there might be a general \u201cbias toward negativity in evaluations of persons or their work,\u201d noting that already by that point, a number of other studies had found the same.<\/p>\n

A 2001 review paper put it bluntly: \u201cbad is stronger than good.\u201d<\/a> And all this research was conducted before the dawn of the doomscrolling Instagram era. It points to something deep in human cognition, rather than the effects of social media.<\/p>\n

Now, in the year of our Lord 2023, your first reaction to someone telling you \u201csocial psychologists say X\u201d should be \u201cwhy in the world<\/a> would I believe social psychologists<\/a>, given that so many of<\/a> their fanciest results<\/a> keep getting overturned<\/a>?\u201d It\u2019s true: This field was ground zero for the \u201creplication crisis,\u201d and many social psych concepts that were once widely touted (like \u201cego depletion,\u201d<\/a> devised by the main authors<\/a> of the \u201cbad is stronger than good\u201d paper) have crumbled when subjected to repeated tests.<\/p>\n

Researchers I spoke with, however, said that the general existence of a negativity bias is so widely validated that it has thus far survived the replication crisis unscathed. A huge \u201cdiversity of labs and traditions and backgrounds have found evidence for negativity bias, in memory and attention across all kinds of stimuli,\u201d Carey Morewedge, professor of marketing and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Boston University, explained. Morewedge\u2019s work<\/a> has found a negativity bias in \u201cexternal agency\u201d: When something bad happens, people are likelier to blame another person for a bad event than give them credit for a good one. Subsequent work on infants replicated that finding<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is probably one of the most robust findings in the psychology literature,\u201d Stuart Soroka, a professor in the communications and political science departments at UCLA, agreed. Soroka specifically studies what this bias means for news. With Patrick Fournier and Lilach Nir, he conducted a massive 17-country study<\/a> with over 1,100 participants measuring how consumers reacted to positive- or negative-seeming news. \u201cRespondents watched 7 randomly ordered BBC World News stories on a laptop computer while wearing noise-cancelling headphones and sensors on their fingers to capture skin conductance and blood volume pulse,\u201d Soroka et al wrote.<\/p>\n

Examples of positive news included a ballet company in Brazil that employs blind dancers, a young child recovering from a liver disease, and a Swedish news story about \u201cthe ongoing popularity of ABBA.\u201d Examples of negative news included the Peruvian town of Chimbote burning down, UN investigations into war crimes in Sri Lanka, and ultra-Orthodox activists in Israel blocking girls from going to school. By looking at physiological responses like \u201cskin conductance,\u201d or how easily electricity passes through the skin, a measure widely viewed as reliable<\/a> that has been in use in various forms since the turn of the 20th century<\/a>, the authors attempted to get around the limits of self-reporting and identify readers\u2019 immediate, sometimes subconscious reactions. Given that people sometimes say they prefer good news even when their behavior suggests the opposite<\/a>, relying on something other than self-reports makes sense.<\/p>\n

Across their sample, they found that negative news provoked stronger physiological reactions and garnered more attention than positive or neutral news on average \u2014 though individual people\u2019s reactions varied quite a bit, with a minority of people responding more to positive news.<\/p>\n

This speaks to the demand side of the bad news dilemma. People who watch and consume news seem to be drawn to negative, dour stories more than positive ones. But it speaks to the supply side too. Journalists have some leeway in deciding what stories to cover, and if we, too, have a negativity bias, we could be facing the same impulses pushing us toward more negative stories that our readers do.<\/p>\n

Good news for people who like good news<\/h3>\n

Soroka is not a doomer. He thinks the conditions for good-vibes journalism are actually improving. For one thing, he doesn\u2019t think the overall mood of reporting is getting worse.<\/p>\n

About a decade ago, he and colleague Lori Young developed a \u201csentiment analysis\u201d tool meant to assess how positive or negative different political messages are, known as the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary<\/a>. The LSD is simple: It contains a list of positively coded words (\u201cdecency,\u201d \u201cpriceless\u201d), and negatively coded words (\u201cbrazen,\u201d \u201cpsychotic\u201d), and counts how often each occurs in the test, adjusting for the use of negations (so \u201cnot good\u201d codes, accurately, as negative and \u201cnot bad\u201d codes as positive). Soroka argues that the dictionary\u2019s classifications of texts into \u201cpositive\u201d versus \u201cnegative\u201d tend on average to line up with how humans classify them, and by automating the process, the LSD enables researchers to analyze much vaster texts.<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"A<\/p>\n<\/picture>\n

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Stuart Soroka and Yanna Krupnikov, The Increasing Viability of Good News<\/a>, 2021.<\/cite><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

He and another co-author, University of Michigan\u2019s Yanna Krupnikov, used the LSD to analyze the sentiment of nightly news segments on NBC, ABC, and CBS from 1990 to 2018. They found no downward trend \u2014 but a lot of variability. Sometimes (after terrorist attacks, notably) coverage is unusually negative; sometimes (like after Barack Obama\u2019s election) it\u2019s glowing. But, on average, there\u2019s not much of a trend line.<\/p>\n

More importantly, Soroka and Krupnikov argue, people vary in their receptiveness to good versus bad news. Good news that seems \u201cnovel\u201d or like an \u201coutlier\u201d tends to get more coverage, as people separately have attention biases toward novelty that can mitigate their negativity bias. (Bad may be stronger than good, but new may be stronger than everything.) They note that on nightly TV news, the final segment is almost always \u201cgood news.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t want to leave the audience on a total downer before you say good night,\u201d Frederica Freyberg, a Wisconsin anchor for PBS, told the authors. In other words, people crave something different from the dour news that came before; they desire novelty.<\/p>\n

Some people are also just overall more interested in good news than others. With his colleague Marc Trussler, Soroka once conducted a lab study to see if consumers who say they prefer good news stories actually click more on them<\/a> in practice. They didn\u2019t; whether you say you want to read good news doesn\u2019t predict your actual consumption habits. But they nonetheless found heterogeneity: There was a substantial minority of people, both those who said they preferred good news and those who didn\u2019t, who really did click more on good news.<\/p>\n

In a world of media monopolies, where most people were dependent on one or two local newspapers and three national news networks, this happy-go-lucky minority was \u2026 out of luck. The majority preference prevailed, and the majority was biased toward the negative.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t live in that world anymore<\/a>. The nightly news has collapsed in popularity, newspapers from halfway around the world are as easy to access as local ones, and just about everyone has access to thousands of rival news outlets. For Soroka and Krupnikov, that suggests that the market for good news is getting stronger. Outlets can carve out niches offering less negatively valenced articles in a way they couldn\u2019t 30 or 40 years ago. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe end result is probably that people are better able to find their ideal balance of content now than they ever were before,\u201d Soroka told me.<\/p>\n

And they find evidence that this is happening, or at least happened for a brief moment. They document that some highly successful news posters on Facebook \u2014 specifically Upworthy and Occupy Democrats on the left, and the \u201cBarracuda Brigade\u201d on the right \u2014 posted more positive than negative news on average. Diehard partisans are open to positive news if it\u2019s mobilizing, affirms their beliefs, etc. That said, because access to more recent data is lacking, their data here all comes before 2017 and the Trump era. Stuff \u2026 got dark then.<\/p>\n

As any reporter can tell you, though, the new media landscape is hardly all roses. For one thing, the algorithmic structure of platforms like Facebook can magnify our own negativity biases. From 2016 to 2019, Facebook gave \u201canger\u201d emoji reactions to posts<\/a> five times as much weight as \u201clikes\u201d in deciding which posts to show other users because their machine learning algorithms found posts that angered people fueled more engagement than posts that pleased them. That partly reflected that humans do, in fact, prefer to share news that enrages them, but it also magnified that tendency, which has costs for both the site and its users.<\/p>\n

News consumers, then, are caught between two competing forces. On the one hand, they enjoy a vastly larger and more diverse news ecosystem than has ever existed before in history, as well as social media networks that serve them up exactly the news they demonstrate they want through their posts, likes, and other interactions. This should in principle make it easier for people who want good news to access it. But it also places consumers at the mercy of their own impulses. While at a higher level they may want to want <\/em>news that makes them less miserable, in the moment they might prefer doomy news \u2014 and the media and the platforms they depend on are only too happy to serve up the bad. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe may, right now, be more motivated to attend to a negative story,\u201d Morewedge explains. \u201cIf there\u2019s enough negative information, that may reduce my incentive to come back to that site. It may have a negative effect on my well-being. In the long-term, these sites may be better suited by providing more of a mix of positive info. Just thinking about what people do in the present may not capture their full preferences.\u201d<\/p>\n

He analogizes the current situation to an algorithmically run airline, which decides to only serve the meals people most want in the moment. That airline would start by offering people either, say, potato chips or baby carrots; when almost everyone chose the potato chips, maybe they\u2019d move on to asking \u201cpotato chips or brownies,\u201d then \u201cbrownies or ice cream,\u201d and before long the whole menu is sugar. That satisfies people\u2019s immediate preferences, but in the long run it makes them miserable.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the tricky task, for news outlets as well as social networks, in thinking about negativity bias. We can give the people what they want right now. But in doing so, we might be feeding them empty calories that will only make them sick in the future.<\/p>\n

dy***<\/span>@*<\/span>ox.com<\/span>“,”short_author_bio”:”is a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section and has worked at Vox since 2014. 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\n Elroy Pingree<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox\u2019s home for ambitious stories that explain our world. In Broadcast News, the movie that made me want to be a journalist, the protagonist Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) has a routine every morning. At an appointed time, she sits and weeps profusely for a minute. When the minute\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":621435,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4895,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-621434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-negative","8":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}