Why Is It So Hard to Hear Good News?: Velcro, Algorithms, Politics and Snickers Bars
It’s hard to hear good news if we aren’t open to the possibility (Photo by Yagendra Singh for Unsplash)
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post and an op-ed about our tendency to pay more attention to bad news than good. My idea was to compare what actually happened with inflation, crime and poverty in 2023 to people’s perceptions of what happened.
It turns out, inflation in the US fell precipitously last year; most forms of crime decreased dramatically and murder rates fell by the greatest amount ever; across the world, an average of 100,000 people a day emerged from extreme poverty.
In the piece I tried to puzzle through why so many people thought the opposite was true – that inflation was out of control, crime was skyrocketing and poverty was getting worse. I put most of it down to our inherent “negativity bias.” I quoted neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, who wrote that our brains are “like Velcro for negative experiences but like Teflon for positive ones.”
I still think that is true, but the reactions I got to the piece helped me understand there is a lot more to it than that. Here are at least three other reasons it is so hard for us to hear good news.
Politics:
Sometimes good news is inconvenient.
The comments about my op-ed on WRAL.com and my post on LinkedIn were overwhelmingly negative and explicitly political; people wrote that it couldn’t possibly be the case that the economy was doing better and crime rate was going down.
For more and more people these days, politics has become their principal religion, and it colors the way we see the world. If we are motivated to see news through a political lens, good news is a challenge to our faith.
If word gets out that something good is happening in our state or country when someone from a different political party is leading, that could be bad news for “our” party. There’s no room for nuance in this kind of world. We can’t accept that some things are going well and others aren’t, or even that no one person deserves credit or blame for any national trend. Instead, every piece of news must fit into a narrative – my party good; other party bad – and any good news that might be linked to the other party must be strangled in the crib. The graph below shows the extent to which we see the economy through red or blue colored lenses.
Republicans were happy about the economy when Trump was in; Democrats when Biden was in.
But that’s not all there is to it. When you ask people to assess everything going on in the country right now, for example, only 2% of Republicans are “satisfied” with the overall direction of the country. But Independents (13%) and Democrats (24%) aren’t much better. Obviously people of different political persuasions are upset about different things, but even with that, there’s a lot of negativity out there. What else could be going on?
Good news is hard to find:
You have to work to find good news; bad news finds us.
It’s not just that we have an internal bias to pay more attention to negative stories than positive ones; we actually are fed more negative stories than positive ones:
· In print and on television we see an average of eight negative stories to every one positive one;
· A 2020 study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” grew significantly over the past two decades;
· A 2019 Facebook study showed stories generating angry emojis were five times more likely to be forwarded or passed along via algorithm than those generating smiley emojis.
If the only thing we hear or read is how bad the world is, we can’t help ourselves: we begin to believe it.
Macro vs. Microeconomics:
Sometimes good news is really hard to see.
In June of 2022, US inflation spiked at 9.1%. By the end of 2023 it had fallen to 3.4% (preliminary estimates have it at 3.1% at the end of January 2024). But consumers still say inflation is their biggest concern. Why? Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS, recently described why this is happening using Snickers bar pricing as an illustration. Cost increases on the items we buy over the course of a year may be stabilizing, Donovan writes, but that’s because the cost of big ticket items, which we only buy occasionally, are going down, while food prices are going up. The average household spends less than 10% of its budget on groceries, but we go to the grocery store much more often than the electronics store.
What matters more to us; lower prices on big ticket items we buy occasionally or higher prices on small ticket items we buy a lot?
The “Snickers bar effect” says we don’t tend to remember that the TV we bought this year was $100 cheaper: we only did that one time. But once a week (or maybe once a day; I’m not judging), when we purchase a Snickers bar (or eggs, or milk), we are reminded it is 10 cents more expensive than it used to be. The effect can get extreme: Donovan notes that a survey of Italian consumers in 2002 showed they thought inflation that year was 18%; in fact it was 2%. Analysts later determined the misperception was driven primarily by the increase in espresso prices.
During the pandemic in 2020, one of my greatest news dreams came true. A show appeared on YouTube called Some Good News. Actor John Krasinski anchored and produce the ultra-low-budget show, which focused on finding, well, good news. And my hope was realized. There really was a market for good news. The show took off, reaching, eventually, 72 million people over 8 episodes. Then it was bought by CBS Viacom. Which of these two things would you guess happened?
A. With the backing of a major media company, the show soared as CBS harnessed Americans latent need for good news, and the show spawned dozens of spinoffs.
B. Some Good News disappeared from view.
OK, it was “B,” but… I still believe there is a place for good news in our media landscape. How can we make that happen?
Notes:
December 2023 poll on American “satisfaction with direction of the country”: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394028/biden-job-approval-not-budging-satisfaction-dips.aspx
The “Snickers bar” effect: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/opinion/inflation-rate-election-voters.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
NBER report on which factors most influence people’s perception of inflation: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26237
Ratio of negative news stories to positive: https://bigthink.com/articles/why-we-love-bad-news-understanding-negativity-bias/
Percentage of negative headlines increasing: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
Disappearance of Some Good News: https://www.looper.com/370822/why-some-good-news-with-john-krasinski-disappeared/