PARAGRAPH: Why are we humans so susceptible to the doom and gloom of the news? Two reasons. The first is what psychologists call negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened of a spider or a snake a hundred times too often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too little surely would.
Second, we’re also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common. The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft disasters, child snatchers and beheadings — which tend to lodge in the memory — completely skews our view of the world.
In this digital age, the news we’re being fed is only getting more extreme. In the old days, journalists didn’t know much about their individual readers. They wrote for the masses. But the people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google know you well. They know what shocks and horrifies you, they know what makes you click. They know how to grab your attention and hold it so they can serve you the most lucrative helping of personalised ads. This modern media frenzy is nothing less than an assault on the mundane. Because, let’s be honest, the lives of most people are pretty predictable. Nice, but boring. So while we’d prefer having nice neighbours with boring lives, ‘boring’ won’t make you sit up and take notice. ‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads. And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021.]
