6/29/2023 0 Comments Bias by headline examplesSoroka specifically studies what this bias means for news. “This is probably one of the most robust findings in the psychology literature,” Stuart Soroka, a professor in the communications and political science departments at UCLA, agreed. Subsequent work on infants replicated that finding. Morewedge’s work has found a negativity bias in “external agency”: When something bad happens, people are likelier to blame another person for a bad event than give them credit for a good one. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Boston University, explained. A huge “diversity of labs and traditions and backgrounds have found evidence for negativity bias, in memory and attention across all kinds of stimuli,” Carey Morewedge, professor of marketing and Everett W. Researchers I spoke with, however, said that the general existence of a negativity bias is so widely validated that it has thus far survived the replication crisis unscathed. Now, in the year of our Lord 2023, your first reaction to someone telling you “social psychologists say X” should be “ why in the world would I believe social psychologists, given that so many of their fanciest results keep getting overturned?” It’s true: This field was ground zero for the “replication crisis,” and many social psych concepts that were once widely touted (like “ego depletion,” devised by the main authors of the “bad is stronger than good” paper) have crumbled when subjected to repeated tests. It points to something deep in human cognition, rather than the effects of social media. 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, a number of other studies had found the same.Ī 2001 review paper put it bluntly: “bad is stronger than good.” And all this research was conducted before the dawn of the doomscrolling Instagram era. 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. “Negativity bias,” the tendency for negative information and experiences to overwhelm the positive, kept coming up. One of social psychologists’ greatest passions is scouring human behavior for its many failures of rationality and perception, the systematic biases that push us off track. That could be a root factor for why the news is so goddamned depressing. Humans, it turns out, have what social psychologists call a “negativity bias”: We tend to pay more attention to bad-seeming information than good-seeming information. It’s, of course, both, and the supply- and demand-side reasons might come from the same source. So … why are we like this? Are we journalists just a miserable lot who insist on spreading our neuroses to the rest of the world? Are readers, despite their protestations to the contrary, likelier to click on news that’s negative or dire? Why? Because, respondents say, it “has a negative effect on their mood.” An international survey from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year found that in almost every country surveyed, trust in media is falling, and more people are saying they’re avoiding news. At least some news consumers aren’t too happy about the situation. Some news consumers have surrendered to the phenomenon and find themselves hooked on “doomscrolling,” in journalist Karen Ho’s memorable term, proceeding between articles asking if the war in Ukraine could be World War III, or whether another world-destabilizing pandemic could be on the way, or if we’ve already passed key climate tipping points. By some measures, the situation is deteriorating a recent study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” grew markedly in the US between 20. Communications scholars have found that across many years and countries, coverage of political topics tends to more often be conveyed in a negative or cynical tone rather than a positive one one study in the mid-2000s found that about half of US, German, Italian, and Austrian campaign coverage conveyed bad news, while as little as 6 percent conveyed good news. Journalists have always been a fairly morose bunch, and the news they produce reflects that. When the minute’s done, she wipes her face and goes about her day without showing outward signs of sadness. At an appointed time, she sits and weeps profusely for a minute. In Broadcast News, the movie that made me want to be a journalist, the protagonist Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) has a routine every morning. Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
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