Why We Seem to Prefer Bad News Over Good News

Not a day goes by, or even an hour, in which we are inundated with negative news stories, whether it’s another school shooting, a new depressing climate change report or political conflict and violence.

But what struck me was the balance in the news coverage. While there were positive stories about the positive and caring responses of people and communities, and commentaries about the need to take proactive action to unite people, the vast majority of the news coverage focused on the negative aspects of the tragic events — images of the scene of the environmental carnage, police, weapons, and experts providing endless detail about the events. The negative stories far outweighed the positive.

Shouldn’t we prefer to hear and see happy and positive news stories?

Bad news can evoke in us emotions such as fear, anger, rage, sadness, grief and despair. Yet we continue to consume it.

Local newspapers and television stations have understood our addiction to the bad for as long as there has been news, but it’s a truth we don’t talk about nearly enough. In the media, this fact is so well known that you’ve probably heard the industry adage, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

The frequency of bad news has increased over time. Negative news was more prevalent on the right than the left until 2013, but over the following ten years, left-leaning news organizations significantly boosted their output of negative news. According to research by Gunther Lengauer and colleagues published in Journalism, from the middle of the 2000s, only 6% of political campaign coverage in the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria reported on positive developments.

A recent study by David Rozado and colleagues published in PLOS One found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” grew markedly in the US between 2000 and 2019.

In a study by Claire E. Robertson and colleagues published in Nature Human Behavior, the authors analyzed the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. They found that “ Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).”

The Impact of Social Media

According to a Pew Center poll, A little under half (48%) of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes,” with Facebook and Twitter being the primary sources, both of which have been criticized heavily for their misinformation and fake news.

In a Huffington Post article by Arianna Huffington, which contrasts social media with mainstream media, she argues for the importance — and popularity — of positive news. Huffington draws in part on recent work published in the New York Times, suggesting that positive stories are more likely to be shared on social networks. This trend in sharing, she suggests, provides evidence that the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to gaining audiences is misguided. News readers, she argues, want more positive news content.

Some experts would disagree with Huffington. Sharing news content on social media, they say, is a fundamentally different thing from selecting and reading articles; even as we may tend to forward positive material via social media, our news-reading habits may still prioritize negative information.

A Pew Center research study suggests social media users tend to forward positive rather than negative information, as John Tierney argues in the New York Times, then we might expect the tone of our news stream to become more positive overall. But it doesn’t.

News Spreads Fastest on Social Media

Researchers from DePaul University and Harvard Business School have also discovered that bad news spreads more quickly on Twitter than good news, for both left- and right-leaning media. Their research was published in the journal Affective Science. The study examined 140,000 tweets from 44 news organizations, most of which were posted in the first four months of 2020, analyzing them for emotional content and reach. “For news organizations, negativity is more frequent and more impactful than positivity,” the authors stated.

“Although people produce much more positive content on social media in general, negative content is much more likely to spread,” Amit Goldenberg, one of the paper’s authors, told Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog.

The results of the study are troubling because of social media’s infectious aspect. What users of technology platforms see not only affects their emotions but also can create “massive-scale contagion” in which people exposed to negative content create more of the same.

This phenomenon first came to light in a controversial 2014 study by Adam D. I. Kramer and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which Facebook altered the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users, making some see mostly happy life events and others sad ones.

Between 2016 and 2019, Facebook’s algorithms prioritized “angry” emoji replies to posts five times more than “likes” when determining which posts to display to other users. Unsurprisingly, as a result, there were a lot of incredibly upsetting posts on Facebook at that time..

Sadly, we are also aware of the effects that reading this kind of news has on people. Consuming constant bad news today, regardless of how it affects our anxiety and despair, is so widespread that it has its term: “doomscrolling.”

Research by E. Alison Holman and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceshas connected news exposure from significant events like terrorist attacks or natural disasters to declining mental health. One’s likelihood of feeling nervous and depressed increased with the amount of news they consumed during or after the occurrence. In one study, participants were presented with positive, negative, and neutral news reports. It was discovered that those exposed to the negative ones worried more about irrelevant personal issues in addition to the issue or topic covered.

The “Availability Heuristic,” which psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have noticed, is the notion that people assess the likelihood of an event or how frequently something happens by how easily they can recall instances of that event. Simply put, if we have experience with or learn about examples of something, we tend to believe that it occurs more frequently. Plane crashes are a great example because they frequently make the headlines. Even though driving is infinitely riskier, people are significantly more afraid of flying.

If you routinely read political news and are reading about corrupt politicians, and war, you can start to believe that all politicians are dishonest and warmongers. You will likely believe this to be more true than it is, in part because news organizations devote considerably less attention to reporting on politicians who are not dishonest, accused or convicted of crimes or promoting war and conflict, or who are successful at working cooperatively with the political opposition.

Even worse, this outcome can leave regular news viewers misinformed or lacking in accurate knowledge. For example, a regular news viewer might believe that crime is increasing since crime is receiving a lot more negative press. Yet, an examination of the statistics shows that crime is decreasing in many cities.

Psychologist Steven Pinker, writing in The Guardian about this question, says “Whether or not the world is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out” — or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.”

Pinker goes on to argue that “putting aside the wiggles and waves that reflect the crises of the day, we see that the impression that the news has become more negative over time is real. The New York Times got steadily more morose from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, lightened up a bit (but just a bit) in the 1980s and 1990s, and then sank into a progressively worse mood in the first decade of the new century. News outlets in the rest of the world, too, became gloomier and gloomier from the late 1970s to the present day.”

A study by the Pew Research Center for People & Press that examined the news stories from over 165 surveys shows that patterns in American news coverage have remained consistent and unchanging for the past 20 years. The study concluded that terrorism-related stories have consistently remained the most interest-generating and therefore most extensively covered stories since 1986.

What accounts media’s acute focus on negative events over positive events? A simple answer is that “bad news sells.” Yet, even though this trend has been in place for the past two decades, patterns in viewership have altered significantly during this time. While in the 1980s, about 30 percent of Americans followed the news “very closely,” this number decreased by seven percent in the 1990s before rising to 30 percent again at the start of the 21st century.

Regardless of these fluctuations, Americans show the greatest interest in media reports about war and terrorism, with bad weather and natural disasters closely following, politics, crime and health falling in a middle-ground, and entertainment and science yielding the fewest viewers.

The fact Because about 90 percent of news Americans hear is negative, the study concludes that there is not necessarily more bad news than good news occurring in the world. Rather, American audiences are simply more compelled toward negative news than positive news.

The City Reporter experimented to test this explanation. After changing the perspective of their stories to appear more positive and covering generally more uplifting stories for one day, the news audience viewing decreased by two-thirds. Even small changes made to focus on the positives, such as saying that there is no disruption in traffic despite bad weather, changed viewer behavior.

Negativity Bias Explained

Some media experts have argued that the media’s focus on negativity is not found in the ratio of bad news to good news, but instead in the psychological human tendency to remember negative memories more clearly than positive ones. As neuroscientist Rick Hansen has said, “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”

This tendency may not only be the cause of the media’s bias toward negative stories but also an effect of this bias. While news outlets do have to ensure that their stories are audience-generating to attract sponsor revenue, the stories they choose to cover also play an important role in shaping their audience’s outlook on the world and opinions on current events.

One of the social psychologists’ greatest passions is scouring human behavior for its many failures of rationality and perception, the systematic biases that push us off track. “Negativity bias,” the tendency for negative information and experiences to overwhelm the positive, kept coming up.

As early as 1967, psychologist Marjorie Richey and co-authors concluded that university students, given paragraphs describing a stranger’s personality, were influenced more by negative descriptions than positive ones. In 1982, Teresa Amabile and Ann Glazebrook proposed that there might be a general “bias toward negativity in evaluations of persons or their work,” noting that already by that point, several other studies had found the same.

What Does the Research Say?

Economics correspondent Paul Solmon did an interesting piece on the cascading effect that consumer pessimism has on our willingness to spend. He said that we are in a state of “learned helplessness”. At worst, continual bad news can even stimulate a state of depression, and people who concentrate on all the bad news work themselves up emotionally and become much more likely to make unwise decisions, like selling all their investments at a huge loss or halting their consumer spending entirely. Even people who don’t watch television or read newspapers are getting hit with nuggets of negativity through social networking and informal conversations.

When everyone was talking about the recent recession, “we all feel like something has to change, even if nothing has changed,” says Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, People may be scared to spend money, scared about losing their jobs and in doing so will restrain their spending. Yet look closely. Consumer sales in entertainment and drugs like Viagra have increased. Viacom’s sales were down from last year but still profitable. Best practice companies with a long-term view are weathering the recession quite well. Social networking in many forms is expanding rapidly.

Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every good news report. Why? The answer may lie in the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists. Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. So while we no longer defend ourselves against sabre-toothed tigers, our brains have not caught up.

Many studies have shown that we care more about the threat of bad things than we do about the prospect of good things. Our negative brain tripwires are far more sensitive than our positive triggers. We tend to get more fearful than happy. And each time we experience fear we turn on our stress hormones.

Another explanation comes from probability theory. In essence, negative and unusual things happen all the time in the world. In his book, Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos explains that if the news is about a small neighborhood of 500 or 5,000, then the possibility that something unusual has happened is low. Unusual things don’t happen to individual people very often.

That’s why every local news like neighborhood newsletters tends to have less bad news. But in a large city of 1 million, dramatic and negative incidents happen all the time. But most people watch national or worldwide media where news reports come in from large cities at a large scale, so the prevalence of negative stories increases. Add the size of social networking communication, and we expand geometrically bad news. So from evolutionary and neuro-scientific and probability perspectives, our brains, from an evolutionary perspective, are “hard-wired” to look for the negative. And it’s part of human nature to share that news.

Echoing Rick Hanson’s quotation on the brain’s preferences, Stuart Soroka and Stephen McAdams, writing in the journal Political Communication, argue that humans’ predisposition to be neurologically or physiologically towards focusing on negative has its roots in an evolutionary-biological account of how humans decide what to pay attention to. They contend: “It is evolutionarily advantageous to prioritize negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information.”

Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, set up an experiment, at McGill University for “a study of eye tracking”. The volunteers were first asked to read political stories from a news website so that a camera could make some baseline eye-tracking measures. It was important, they were told, that they read the articles, so the right measurements could be prepared, but it didn’t matter what they read.

After this ‘preparation’ phase, they watched a short video, and then they answered questions on the kind of political news they would like to read.

Trussler and Soroka reported participants often chose stories with a negative tone rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.

Here’s the interesting part. When the researchers asked what kind of news the participants preferred, they said they preferred good news. And yet, they also said that the media was too focussed on negative stories.

Trussler and Soroka say their experiment is evidence of a so-called “negativity bias“, or “schadenfreude,” a psychologist’s term for our collective desire to hear and remember bad news. It isn’t just schadenfreude, they contend, but that peoples’ brains have evolved to react quickly to potential threats. Bad news could be a signal that they need to change what they’re doing to avoid danger.

Trussler and Soroka argue there’s some evidence that people respond quicker to negative words. In their experiments, they flashed the word “cancer”, “bomb” or “war” up at someone and they hit a button in response quicker than if that word is “baby”, “smile” or “fun” (despite these pleasant words being slightly more common). Participants were also able to recognize negative words faster than positive words, and even tell that a word is going to be unpleasant before they can tell exactly what the word is going to be.

There’s another interpretation that Trussler and Soroka advanced: people pay attention to bad news because they think the world is better or more positive than it is. This pleasant view of the world makes bad news all the more surprising and salient. It is only against a light background that the dark spots are highlighted. So peoples’ attraction to bad news may be more complex than just journalistic cynicism or a hunger springing from the darkness within, Trussler and Soroka argued.

They argue that “negative network news content, in comparison with positive news content, tends to increase both arousal and attentiveness. In contrast, positive news content has an imperceptible impact on the physiological measures we focus on. Indeed, physiologically speaking, a positive news story is not very different from the gray screen we show participants between news stories.”

What About Our Personal Lives?

Psychologist John Gottman at the University of Washington found that there is a kind of thermostat operating in healthy marriages that regulates the balance between positive and negative. He found that relationships run into serious problems when the negative-to-positive ratio becomes seriously imbalanced. If a couple is unable to maintain the 5:1 ratio of positivity to negativity conflict is likely to increase while relationship satisfaction will likely decrease.

He also found that the magic ratio is five positive to one negative. If you want to learn how to stay positive in a negative world you must expose yourself to as many positive experiences as you can while minimizing exposure to the negative, Gottman says.

Do You Want the Good News or the Bad News First?

An opening like that will send a chill through your veins, no matter what the topic. It’s especially worrying when coming from a significant other or a doctor. And the statement is often followed by a question: Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news? A new study says that you probably want the bad news first. But it also finds that, if the decision is left to the news deliverer, you can’t always get what you want.

Psychologists Angela Legg and Kate Sweeny from the University of California, Riverside decided to answer this age-old question and to see whether the person giving the news wanted to give the good news or the bad news first. Finally, they looked at how the order in which the information is delivered might change how people feel about the news. Their results were published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The scientists had 121 college students come into the lab in pairs. The researchers assigned each pair a news-giver and a news recipient. The students did not know their partners beforehand. All students took a personality test designed to assess the Big Five personality dimensions: conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness. A few minutes later, an experimenter came in and told the students that their tests were scored and that there was both good news and bad news. For example, a student might have tested high on leadership but turned out to look very selfish indeed.

In reality, the tests had not been scored, and the students wouldn’t end up getting the real good news or bad news. They just had to pick which one they wanted first. For the news receivers, the experimenter asked which they would like to receive first, and why. Their only job was to receive news. For the news-givers, the experimenter told them they would have to deliver the results of a personality test, and news-givers were asked which they would like to give first, and why.

Using separate groups of students in a new test, the experimenters then actually gave people the results of their personality tests with good news or the bad news first and asked how worried they were as the test went on. They also tested whether telling the news-givers to think of the other person’s feelings altered the order which in they wanted to give the news.

And we do like to get the bad news first. A whopping 78 percent of students tested said that they wanted the bad news first, thanks. This is consistent with previous studies, which also showed that people would rather get the bad news first.

However much you want it, you might not get it: 54 to 68 percent of news-givers preferred to give the good news first. When the news-givers were prompted to feel empathy for the receiver with statements like “put yourself in the receiver’s shoes,” the percentage who wanted to give the bad news first increased, but the effects weren’t very large (though they were statistically significant). You want the bad news first, but they don’t want to give it to you.

But does getting the bad news first make a difference Legg and Sweeney asked. To answer that question, they had a third group of students get either good news first or bad news first, and assessed how worried they were before and after they’d gotten the news. Both groups displayed increased worry, no matter what order the news came in. However, But students who received the bad news first ended up less worried than those who received the good news first.

Legg and Sweeney also wanted to determine if it made a difference if the person was the giver or receiver of the bad news and if the information will be used to modify behavior. They found if participants were on the receiving end, more than 75 percent of them wanted the bad news first. “If people know they are going to get bad news, they would rather get it over with,” Legg says. Then, if there is good news to follow, “you end on a high note.”

Conversely, Legg and Sweeney found that news givers — 65 and 70 percent — chose to give the good news first, then the bad news. “When news givers go into a conversation, they are anxious. No one enjoys giving bad news. They don’t understand that having to wait for bad news makes the recipient more anxious.”

But good news first, then bad could be a useful strategy if the goal is to get someone to change a behavior — when, for example, Legg says, “you are giving feedback to a patient needing to lose weight, who has to take action. The recipient doesn’t feel good about the news, but may do something about it.”

The Sandwich Approach

Then there is what Legg calls the good news, bad news, good news sandwich — when the bad news comes between pieces of good news on either side. Example: “Your cholesterol is down. By the way, your blood pressure is morbidly high. Your blood sugar levels are good.” That’s fine if you want someone to feel good, she says. “But hiding the bad news in the sandwich is generally not a good strategy. It downplays the bad news, and the recipient gets confused.”

The person who delivers a bad news sandwich is engaging in what Legg calls conversational acrobatics. “They believe they are making the conversation easier, but the message gets garbled.” There’s even an acronym in psychological jargon for people who delay giving out bad news or avoid it altogether — MUM (mum about undesirable messages). “The best news-giving strategies take into account that sometimes we want to make people feel good and sometimes we need them to act,” she says.

Legg’s advice to doctors is that when relaying a diagnosis or prognosis, it’s better to give the bad news first, and then the positive information to help the patient accept it. “Many physicians prefer not to have to give bad news until it’s obvious,” says Thomas J. Smith, director of palliative medicine at the Johns Hopkins Institution in Baltimore.

According to one study Smith cites, “If we look at the charts of people with lung cancer, only 22 percent of the charts have any notation that the doctor and patient talked about the fact that the patient is going to die,” he says. ” Most of the time the conversation goes along the lines of ‘it’s incurable but treatable.’ Many times it doesn’t get mentioned again.” Yet, Smith says that 90 percent of people say they want truthful and honest information, even if it’s negative.

The “bad news” conversation, Smith stresses, needs to be more than one conversation. “When you give a bad diagnosis, they don’t hear anything [anyone says] for the next three weeks anyway. They are stunned. ” The situation is improving according to Smith. “Forty years ago when I started, palliative care wasn’t the norm,” he says. Now, at Johns Hopkins, medical students practice breaking bad news to a trained actor “patient.” “Many [other] countries are changing, as well. Japan has shifted from no one being told to everyone being told” the truth, even if it’s bad news, he says.

In Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Boston College psychologist, Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues, explain when emotion is likely to reduce our memory inconsistencies. Her research shows that whether an event is pleasurable or aversive seems to be a critical determinant of the accuracy with which the event is remembered, with negative events being remembered in greater detail than positive ones.

For example, after seeing a man on a street holding a gun, people remember the gun vividly, but they forget the details of the street. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), studies have shown increased cellular activity in emotion-processing regions at the time that a negative event is experienced.

The more activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala, two emotion-processing regions of the brain, the more likely an individual is to remember details intrinsically linked to the emotional aspect of the event, such as the exact appearance of the gun.

Kensinger argues that recognizing the effects of negative emotion on memory for detail may, at some point, save our lives by guiding our actions and allowing us to plan for similar future occurrences. “These benefits make sense within an evolutionary framework,” writes Kensinger. “It is logical that attention would be focused on potentially threatening information.”

This line of research has far-reaching implications for understanding autobiographical memory and assessing the validity of eyewitness testimony. Kensinger also believes that this research may provide insight into the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Is There Any Good News in All of This?

There will always be bad news somewhere in the world or your own life, but understanding your natural bias toward negativity can help you to consciously direct your focus toward the encouraging, motivating and positive influences around you.

According to positive psychologists, we can change our habits, and we can focus on the glass being half-full. When we acquire new habits, our brains acquire “mirror neurons” and develop a positive perspective that can spread to other people like a virus. This is not about being a Pollyanna or “goody-two-shoes,” is about being able to reprogram our brains. To apply this positive psychology and brain research knowledge to our attitudes and behaviors about our current economic, social or environmental conditions, we can encourage our news deliverers to present a more balanced and multi-dimensional point of view. Giving us the bad news, so that our brains are hard-wired into a negative state, will just reinforce the negativity. You also might want to consider that the best thing you can do is watch and read less news and search for more positive stories.

And keep in mind that major mainstream news sources have a vested (including financial) interest in predominantly reporting bad news, knowing that it is implicitly their audiences’ preferred focus. And this is an echo chamber by social media, creating a storm of negative information for us to navigate, and providing a picture of reality that is not accurate. To create a diet of news for yourself, be selective, and check the sources for truthfulness.