We love bad news 🔪🩸
"The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news."
—Psychologist Daniel Kahneman
> newsworthy | negativity
Graduate school eventually led me to the conclusion that during my time in the news industry, I'd acquired only a superficial understanding of what really propelled audiences.
Science and the internet shattered long-held assumptions about readers, listeners, and viewers.
Did they make rational (reasoned) choices about content? Or did they make irrational (intuitive) choices?
- The answer is in decades of extraordinary discoveries about the human mind made by psychologists, behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, and others.
- We know more now about the science of what media content captures-and-holds our attention, not always with our full conscious awareness.
- Published year after year in research journals, the findings include what we now know to be profound media effects on audiences.
As audience members, we don't fully grasp why we choose one piece of content over another.
Why does some content make us feel lazy and other content doesn't? We're viewing it from the same couch.
We don't know when our media choices are rational or irrational.
And we don't fully understand how we're affected by the content itself, from police-reality shows to street fights on YouTube.
News consumers often insist that they want more "positive" news. But studies find them drifting toward stories with a "negative" tone and without the participants consciously knowing it.
Some researchers say news organizations are trained by audiences – not the other way around – to focus on "bad news." Yet audiences decry bad news as cognitive junk.
Scientists say the truth is that we're wired with a "negativity bias." We appear programmed to favor "bad" news over "good," but that doesn't make us evil. Mind experts say the reason is survival.
A feel-good story might make us feel good. But a negative story could alert us to danger.
We can’t feel good unless we survive first.
- next time "I've seen the room where Tupac was autopsied."
- listening FKA twigs "Two Weeks"
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