The Psychology of The News - Negativity Bias

Do you often find the news depressing? Why is it news is almost synonymous with bad news? Why are positive stories almost a bolt-on, rather than the majority of reporting? We’ll explore these questions, and more, within this series.

To understand why it is that the news is often so depressing, we need to understand the neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology, of attention and memory. What we pay attention to, is important. In fact, there was a time when what we paid attention to was a matter of life or death. If our ancestors (pre-human ancestors, that is) paid more attention to the positive parts of life – food, family, comfort etc – then they may well have been as happy as was possible. However, the ancestors who paid attention to the negative things more – predators, threats, problems etc – may well have been less happy, but would have been more likely to survive. To pay attention to the many ways they could die, meant they were less likely to die that those who didn’t. In this way, we can see how we, as animals, could have evolved to focus our attention on the negatives over the positives. It is possible to see, therefore, that pessimism, anxiety, stress etc are actually the standard state of humans. Our drive and wish for positivity, optimism and relaxation is an attempt to change our natural way of being, to alter our evolved mind.

So, we may naturally focus more on the negative. Negative events also are more likely to stick within our memory. In fact, you are almost certain to have twice as many negative memories than you do positive memories. Think about plane journeys you have had. The ones that went well, are most likely mostly forgotten, merged into one memory or are reconfigured in your mind in a very basic way. However, if you have had a plan journey where something unexpectedly negative happened – a large amount of turbulence or a missed landing for example – those memories will be firmly lodged in your mind in good detail. This is because, by remembering the negative, you can avoid future negative events. In evolutionary terms, by remembering what almost kills you, you can avoid similar situations in the future. This is why you are much more likely to remember a car crash you’ve been in, than a successful car journey. This seems obvious, but in psychology it is important to question the obvious. In fact, our brains could just remember everything equally (which does happen to people who have hyperthymesia), but they have decided, it seems, to focus on retaining the negative and ridding the positive. The neural connections for such memories are stronger and dominant.

How does this impact the news media? Find out in the next part of this series.