[ad_1]
Have you ever wondered why there was so much bad news? This may be because people find the bad news more interesting than the good news.
A new study covering more than 1,000 people in 17 countries from all continents, but the Antarctic concludes that, on average, people pay more attention to negative news than to positive news.
The results, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that this human bias towards negative news could be a big part of what results in the coverage of negative news. But the results also revealed that not everyone shared this negative bias, and some even had a positive bias – a sign that there might be a market for positive news.
"In a period in which news from around the world is particularly negativist, this topic is of obvious importance," wrote the study's authors.
Lead author Stuart Soroka, a political scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said he and his colleagues were interested in the psychology of negative prejudices – the tendency of people to pay more attention to negative information than 'positive information – and their role. could play in shaping the news.
Among academics, an explanation for this bias was that "reporters were angry people and skeptics and that they produced a lot of negative content, which was bad – bad for democracy and bad for those who read the news, "said Soroka. "We suspected that the way the information was given did not only depend on what journalists felt, but more on what the audience was responding to."
Scientists have pointed out that the evolution of the negativity bias exists for some reasons. On the one hand, it can be much more risky to ignore negative information (a storm announces) than good news (a dog has saved a boy from a tree). According to the researchers, paying attention to negative news is usually an effective survival strategy.
Although previous studies have examined the negativity bias, they have largely focused on subjects who were young white, American, and university adults. Soroka said that he wanted to see if
the results of these studies could be generalized
to the rest of the world.
For a more global vision, scientists recruited 1,156 people in 17 countries: Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, Sweden and United Kingdom. and the United States.
The researchers did their best to find more study participants whenever they could. For example, they recruited from markets in Ghana and took their laboratory equipment to a hangar at a construction complex in India.
"It really depended on where we could get a good sample," Soroka said.
Each participant was shown seven randomly selected BBC World News reports, some of which were negative and others more positive. While the participants were watching, the researchers monitored their heart rate and cutaneous level of conductance (essentially tiny fluctuations in the level of perspiration that could indicate the level of response to a person's fight or flight).
The researchers found that, on average, a small majority of viewers were biased towards more negative news. This has largely taken place across countries and cultures, said Soroka.
However, scientists have also found that at an individual level, there appears to be a high level of variability in responses. About 2 out of 5 participants showed no bias for negative news or positive news.
This means that the old adage "If it bleeds, it leads" may not always apply anymore, said Richard Lau, a political psychologist at Rutgers University, who did not participate in the event. 39; study.
"One of the things that comes out of the study is that there is a lot of variability among people," Lau said. "This is true in all cultures."
Soroka suggested that this could mean that the media could push the proportion of bad news good news while retaining an audience.
"This is not the case, most people still want negative news," Soroka said. "And knowing that, I think, opens up other possibilities with regard to the news."
[ad_2]
Source link