Thanks for thoughts @KarlT and @RapAdmin
Itâs very interesting to see how others think about the world.
Let me share one line of research that might be valuable to consider. This might be one of my most important posts ever on this forum.
(And please note that one of humansâ main biases is to believe that we are ourselves are personally totally rational, and not biased even if others are. So try and let the concepts below sink it before judging if anything in it might be true).
Why must it âbleedâ to âleadâ the news? Our amygdala, and our memory for trauma, may explain. And show us how to route around it.
Chairman of the X Prize Foundation, Peter H. Diamandis:
Human beings are constantly bombarded with information. Because our brains have a limited computing power, they have to separate what is important, such as a lion running toward us, from what is mundane, such as a bed of flowers.
Because survival is more important than all other considerations, most information enters our brains through the amygdala â a part of the brain that is âresponsible for primal emotions like rage, hate and fear.â
Information relating to those primal emotions gets our attention first because the amygdala âis always looking for something to fear.â
Our species, in other words, has evolved to prioritise bad news.
The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has noted that the nature of cognition and nature of news interact in ways that make us think that the world is worse than it really is.
As Pinker points out, we ânever see a reporter saying to the camera, âHere we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out.ââ
Newspapers and other media, in other words, tend to focus on the negative. As the old journalistic adage goes, âIf it bleeds, it leads.â
The human brain also tends to overestimate danger due to what psychologists call âthe availability heuristicâ or a process of estimating the probability of an event based on the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. Unfortunately, human memory recalls events for reasons other than their rate of recurrence. When an event turns up because it is traumatic, the human brain will overestimate how likely it is to reoccur.
Psychological literature shows that people fear losses more than they look forward to gains; dwell on setbacks more than relishing successes; resent criticism more than being encouraged by praise. Bad, in other words, is stronger than good.
Finally, good and bad things tend to happen on different timelines. Bad things, such as plane crashes, can happen quickly. Good things, such as the strides humanity has made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tend to happen incrementally and over a long period of time. [and are less defined and also for these reasons less part of what we see in the news, hear in conversations with friends or see on social media]
As Kevin Kelly from Wired has put it, âEver since the Enlightenment and the invention of Science, weâve managed to create a tiny bit more than weâve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades in to what we might call civilisation ⌠[Progress] is a self-cloaking action [that goes un unnoticed and un emphasized]
Can watching the news make you sick?
The amygdala allows us to notice negative news 10 times faster than any positive ones. We pay way more attention to everything negative than positive.
Over the course of time, this beautiful brain feature has served us well and in many situations, it was absolutely essential for the survival of men. Yet, today no tiger is waiting around the corner to take us for lunch. The amygdala is still very useful in situations of danger. But at the same time, it can be abused by those who know how to do so â i.e. media companies.
Why We Love Bad News: Understanding Negativity Bias
90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because thatâs what we pay attention to
The Media and the Politicians Know We Have an Evolutionary Hangover called Fear
Why do so many people feel pessimistic, and scared of what the future holds?
In recent years, thereâs been a spate of new research suggesting the answers can be found in neuroscience.
Brain imaging studies of healthy humans show that when we are exposed to potential threats, neural activity in the amygdala increases and the body responds through sweating or an increased heart rate. This is known as the amygdala hijack. And it works even if the threatening stimuli are presented subliminally. For example, we identify angry faces faster than happy ones; our ancient fight-or-flight limbic system is activated even if weâre shown the images so quickly (just a tenth of a second or so) that we donât have any conscious recollection.
In another study, done last year, researchers tracked peopleâs eyesight as they read from a selection of news stories, and showed that they lingered far longer on the negative news.
Thatâs why the majority of our news stories are negative. Itâs a simple commercial decision. The media makes money by making you pay attention to a story, and negative or potentially scary stories are more compelling than optimistic ones.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/media-our-politicians-know-we-have-evolutionary-hangover-angus-hervey#
https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2019/3/31/a-better-media-bleeds-leads?format=amp
