A growing body of evidence illustrates the human tendency to prioritise negative over positive news content. But why is this? Stuart Soroka suggests that humans may neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information

Soroka, Stuart

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blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2015/05/27/why-do-we-pay-more-attention-to-negative-news-than-to-positive-news/Why do we pay more attention to negative news than to positivenews?A growing body of evidence illustrates the human tendency to prioritise negative over positivenews content. But why is this? Stuart Soroka suggests that humans may neurologically orphysiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costsof negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information.A recent article by Arianna Huffington argues for the importance – and popularity – of positivenews. Huffington draws in part on recent work suggesting that positive stories are more likely tobe shared on social networks. This trend in sharing, she suggests, provides evidence that the “if itbleeds, it leads” approach to gaining audiences is misguided. News readers, she argues, want more positive newscontent.Sharing news content on social media is a fundamentally different thing from selecting and reading articles,however. (Indeed, the study on which Huffington relies recognises this.) Even as we may tend to forward positivematerial via social media, our news-reading habits may still prioritise negative information. There is after all agrowing body of evidence illustrating the human tendency to prioritise negative over positive news content.The behaviour of newspapers and programs offers one obvious clue – news agencies seek audiences, after all,and experience (and sales) points towards the value of negative information. For instance, and as the figure belowillustrates, newsstand magazine sales increase by roughly 30 per cent when the cover is negative rather thanpositive. It is no surprise, then, that a “good news day” resulted in a 66 per cent decrease in readership in anonline Russian newspaper. Indeed, other research suggests that even when participants say that they would likemore positive news, they still select online news stories that are predominantly negative. Even as emails andFacebook feeds highlight good, our news consumption habits still prioritise information that is negative.Figure 1 – The relationship between the tone of magazine covers and salesBut why do we pay more attention to negative news than to positive news? Answering this question (at least inpart) is the focus of “News, Politics, and Negativity,” a paper that Stephen McAdams and I recently published inPolitical Communication. The paper draws on work in psychology, economics, and political communications tosuggest that humans may neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information.The argument has its roots in an evolutionary-biological account of how humans decide what to pay attention to. Itis evolutionarily advantageous to prioritise negative information, the argument goes, because the potential costsof negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information. The human brain is as aconsequence predisposed towards focusing on negative information.We cannot easily prove an evolutionary story, of course. But we can examine news viewers’ psychophysiologicalreactions to positive and negative news content. The aim of our recent paper was to do exactly this. The paperreports results from a lab experiment in which participants view a selection of real television news stories while wemonitor a number of physiological indicators, including heart rate and skin conductance. Skin conductancecaptures the degree to which we are sweating, which changes constantly in very small ways, and which is oftenused as a measure of activation or arousal. Decreased heart rate is used as a measure of attentiveness.Our findings suggest that negative network news content, in comparison with positive news content, tends toincrease both arousal and attentiveness. In contrast, positive news content has an imperceptible impact on thephysiological measures we focus on. Indeed, physiologically speaking, a positive news story is not very differentfrom the gray screen we show participants between news stories.Our study is one of the first to demonstrate this tendency using real television news content. It thus makes veryclear the implications that a negativity bias in humans’ brains has for the nature of news content. (Not to mentionthe nature of political and economic behaviour more generally, discussed in more detail here.) News content ispredominantly negative because humans tend to be more attentive to negative information.Whether this is a bad thing is, I believe, unclear. Focusing on negative information may be a perfectly reasonableway of managing a complex news environment. We typically need to change our behaviour, or our assessment ofpoliticians, when something goes wrong, not when something goes right. So unless we have an unlimited amountof time to pay attention to everything, we may be well-served by focusing on the information that requires achange on our part – provided that all that negativity does not also lead to overwhelming scepticism ordisengagement, of course.The difficulty is that we do not really know the ‘appropriate’ amount of negativity. Nor do we know if there are waysto adjust our negativity biases. This may be a good avenue for comparative research, and my ongoing work withPatrick Fournier and Lilach Nir is one of a growing of studies exploring the possibility that negativity biases varysystematically across cultures, and media systems. If negativity biases shift from one country to the next, we maybe able to learn something about how communications and political contexts can increase or decrease our interestin negative over positive information.Future work might also consider the implications that social media have on the tone of the news content that wereceive. If we increasingly receive news content through social media, and if social media users tend to forwardpositive rather than negative information, then we might expect the tone of our ‘news stream’ (all the news wereceive by traditional or non-traditional means) to become more positive overall. Whether this leads to a moreinformed or attentive electorate is another matter, however. We may be better informed about successful policyinitiatives. We may alternatively lose (even more) interest in politics.This blog post was originally published at the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog.Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1Bpqhbz _________________________________ About the authorStuart Soroka – University of MichiganStuart Soroka is the Michael W. Traugott Collegiate Professor of Communication Studies andPolitical Science, and Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for SocialResearch, University of Michigan. His work focuses on political communication, the sourcesand/or structure of public preferences for policy, and the relationships between public policy,public opinion, and mass media. His most recent book is Negativity in Democratic Politics (2014,Cambridge University Press). CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 2014 LSE USAPP

Why do we pay more attention to negative news than to positive news?

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Why do we pay more attention to negative news than to positive news?

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