The science and math behind 'bad news'

With the "fun not fear" Facebook campaign, we are combatting the culture of fear with good news, good acts and a focus on the importance of everyday creativity.

Members of the campaign, however, often complain about the media and question why the media gives us such bad news all the time. Many people ask this question. It's a constant refrain: why is the news always so negative? And they are right to ask. Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news - perhaps by as much as 17 negative news reports for every 1 good news report. 

There's a lot to say about this topic. I've been studying this for many years. I had a fellowship in college in the 1980s to study the international media and its coverage of southern Africa. My hypothesis now is that a little bit of evolutionary neuroscience and a sprinkling of probabalistic math help answer this question about the preponderance of bad news - while positive and developmental psychology suggest what to do given the answer to this question. 

According to the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists, humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. They say our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately - or we might get eaten or a neighboring tribe might kill us. While most humans no longer experience the daily threat of predatory animals, these scientists explain that our brains have not yet caught up.

Countless studies have demonstrated that we care much more about the threat of bad things - say losing money - than we do about the prospect of good things - say making money. These studies show that our negative tripwires are about two times more sensitive than our positive triggers. This means we get fearful more easily than happy. And each time we experience just a bit of fear we turn on our stress system. 

Biology professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford discusses the stress system in detail in his very good book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. I sent this book to members of the Councils two years ago - as part of a program I ran to prepare members for a potential economic downturn (note: I had no idea it would become as bad as it has). In his book and in a conference call with us, Sapolsky explained how our stress system, built for outrunning predatory animals like lions, breaks down in this modern environment. If, while sitting in a chair, we activate our stress system 10x a day because of deadlines, presentations, the gyrations of the stock market or the loud noises of the city, then we do real damage. Chronic stress creates heart disease, diabetes and many other problems and our stress can trigger the stress of those around us. It also helps to explain why we crave bad news. Despite the damage it does, activating the stress system becomes a habit.

That we look for - almost crave - negative and dramatic news is obviously a big part of the reason that news is often so negative. In other words, the media is doing it's job: it gives us the bad news we seem to want. But, there is one more piece to be explained. Where does the media get all the bad news? This is where probability theory helps. Probability theory has a counter-intuitive lesson to teach: unusual things happen all the time. 

In his very good book, Innumeracy, Professor John Allen Paulos applies probability theory to the very question we are addressing. Paulos explains that if the news is about a small neighborhood of 500 or 5,000, then the possibility that something unusual has happened happen is low. Think about why. Unusual things don't happen to individual people very often. Rare events are rare for individuals. And even if there are a few hundred or thousand people together, it's still unlikely that something unusual will happen to one of those people. That's why very local news like a neighborhood newsletters tends to have less bad news. But, as Paulos says, 300 1-in-a-million incidents happen everyday in a country like the U.S. with 300 million people.

Thus, according to Paulos' applied probability theory, city newspapers are more dramatic than their local neighborhood brethren. Big city newspapers - with a larger population and thus a higher probability of rare events - are even more dramatic. National media have an even better ability to find those tornadoes that stick people in trees - remember there are 300 1-in-a-million incidents everyday that a national media outlet has available when considering what to report. And international news, according to Paulos, has the whole world to look for the man-eating tigers or catastrophes that we want to know about. 

The web is the next technology in a long line of 150 years of technologies that spread information at an accelerating rate. Now, anyone with a web connection can find bad news anywhere around the world and share it with friends and family through social networks like Facebook. So, if the BBC World News covers something terrible that happened, then anyone with a web connection now has immediate access to it no matter where they live.

That's the bad news: according to evolutionary scientists and probability theorists, we are hard-wired to look for the dramatic and the negative and the web, with its worldwide scope, really helps us find it and share it. 

The good news? We can do something about it. How? According to positive psychologists and developmental psychologists, we don't have to be stuck in doing the same old thing. Positive psychologists suggest we can change our habits and by focusing on that half-full glass we can be more than half-way happy. They say that new habits change our brains and that something they call "mirror neurons" means that our increased happiness will spread around like a virus to others. 

Developmental psychologists talk about performance and play and that we can create new roles. They aren't so much into habits or mirror neurons as they are into improvisation and group dynamics. They say that we can perform "ahead of ourselves" and change how we see and interact with the world. 

Positive psychologists tend to focus on the most successful people while developmental psychologists study people - like inner-city youth - who are most left out of our culture and suggest that an approach that works for them will work for everyone.

I like to learn from both schools of psychology. Their approaches help to point to what to do given that bad news outpaces good news by such a wide margin and seems likely to do so for some time to come.

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