I.
It was a cloudy day in New York City.
“Get ya doom, fresh doom here! Get ya doom while it’s still hot!” said a man on a street corner. His name was Lemon Carlson—an older man whose spent his entire career working for ‘True News.’
“What doom? What’s happening?” asked a teenager named Peter, walking by on his way to school.
“Tell me, sir, in what form would you like your news that will cause crippling anxiety and sadness over things you don’t control?” Lemon Carlson replied with a sad smile.
“What do you mean?”
“You want big picture news or little?”
“Uh, I don’t think I can handle big picture.”
“That’s fine. Last night in Brooklyn, a kid with a scholarship to play college basketball got shot, and…”
“Ah, too personal! Just give me the big picture stuff.”
“Ok, well, super-intelligent AI will kill us all soon. And world war 3 is more and more likely every day.”
“Damn. At-least it’s good I’m staying informed.” Peter said, his mood ruined.
“Indeed, sir, that’s why you should subscribe. The only cost is your peace of mind.”
II.
Maybe society is getting worse and worse. Maybe the world is always close to ending.
But also, maybe, doom just sells really fucking well.
Negativity attracts the most attention not just in the news, but in other areas too. Think fiction books. Many of the most successful novels are stories of a dystopian future where life is hell on earth. Like Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 for example. These novels are important, and they make prescient warnings about different dangers we face as a civilization. But they nonetheless support the doom-selling-well hypothesis. Those 3 books have combined to sell ~100s of millions of copies over the years.
Or think movies. Remember when everyone was freaking out about how the Mayans forgot to make more pages on their calendar, so somehow that meant we were all screwed? Lots of internet and news sources got plenty of attention for spreading the fear that these ancients knew the world would end in 2012. And finally the movie was made about it—called 2012—which made $789 million worldwide at the box office.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense why humans have a bias towards negativity. We’re programmed to be hyper-aware of potential threats. For good reason, too. Throughout history our ancestors needed to be able to survive in the wild. We had to have brains that were constantly looking out for possible dangers.
But now, many information sources exploit this aspect of human nature. Of your nature.
III.
Sensational headlines generate more clicks and views (I’m guilty of this too). Which is why news corporations use them so much—they generate more advertising revenue for their business. There’s a reason a saying in the industry is “if it bleeds, it leads.” These companies have a strong incentive to intentionally create a sense of panic around certain issues to keep audiences engaged.
“In the era of the 24/7 news cycle clicks are currency and the choice that news sources make to frame stories in a negative light comes down to biology. This phenomenon is known as negativity bias and it describes the compulsion we as humans have to pay more attention to negative or “bad news”. This has led to publications framing stories to promote the negative aspects in headlines and silence the positive.
Negativity bias is appealed to often by social media, not only through click bait headlines (consider the headline on this article for instance), but in the way social platform’s algorithms are designed to capture attention. While the application to social media is a growing area, the use of negativity and outrage has historically defined the industry.”
Haven’t you noticed? Don’t you see how the biggest news stories—without exception—are negative ones? Are you never suspicious of this?
Of course, today, there’s still no shortage of threats that you face. That humans face.
The point is not that it’s good to be a stone-bag who thinks nothing can go wrong and everything is going to end up fine no matter what. The point is—it’s smart to have an awareness that doom sells better than pretty much anything, and that many people have powerful incentives to spread it. Knowing this can clear your mind and improve your thinking.
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Jeff Sullivan’s Three Pointers
Great article and so true! The news tends to stress me out so I try to limit what I watch and read.
Nice job, Jeff!