Why We Can’t Stop Clicking on Bad News

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Ever heard the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads”?

It means, basically, that “sensational, violent stories are to be prioritized.”

Everyone who writes headlines for news stories or online articles knows that people seem to like to click on the bad-news stories. And,in an environmentwhere the number of clicks drives revenue and advertising, you can bet that media (especially for-profit journalism) will give the people what they want to click on.

But why? Why do we all want to click on the links that aremad, bad, and almost always sensational?

What the research says

Readers’ desire to focus on bad news is not actually news. Long before our present (even more) divisive social debates and political affiliations, researchers were trying to understand why “bad news dominates the headlines.”

In 2014, two researchers at the McGill University in Canada designed an experiment to measure people’s reactions to news headlines. The researchers did not tell participants that they were studying their news preferences; instead, they told them they were tracking their “eyemovements.” They asked their participants to read subjects of their choice from a news website, watch a short video on a different subject that was meant simply as a “filler activity” to distract them, and then ask those same participants what type of news they preferred.

Their findings? People tended to read stories with negative subject matters and tones. But when they were asked about what they liked to read? A majority reported that they preferred good news.

Even more tellingly, the researchers found thatpeople who reported being most interested in current events and the news were “particularly likely to choose negative stories.”

This is not a new area for study. Back in 2008, aWashington Postblogger also highlighted a 2003 study that looked at journalism and newspaper headlinesfrom the 1700s through 2001. That study also concluded that, during that long period, “stories about death, injury, robberies and murder dominated the front-page headlines.”

There have also been less news-centric studies that highlight the human tendency to notice the negative. In one study from 2003, participants were briefly shown negative words, positive words, or no words at all. The words the study subjects tended to remember most? That’s right.The negative ones.

The guesses behind the research

But WHY do our eyes and our attention seem naturally drawn to bad news?

Based on their studies, researchers have made a number of suggestions to explain this human predilection for the negative.

First, there is the “negativity bias.”

The negativity bias is defined as our tendency to morereadily recognize negative stimuli, and to remember or dwell on them more. Some believe this has its basis in evolution — early in our human history,it was more important to pay more attention to the dangers that might kill us. Further,those who noticed and responded to threats more quickly and successfully might have had better survival rates,and been able to pass along their genetic predispositions to negativity to their offspring.

Other researchers posit that another human tendency — our habit of over-estimating our own qualities and skills — ironically makes us more interested in negative news. Our positive view of how well we’re able to handle difficult situations might make us search out bad news.

In other words: we may need the narrative that things are bad. But we also want the second part of the story to be that we are able and willing to overcome problems,because we have a desire to see that “things really will work out.”

We can change this habit if we want

The addition of social media and anonymous comment sections has seemingly not encouraged us to become more even-tempered in our reaction to news stories.

Another human bias that comes into play when focusing on bad news is the“confirmation bias.”This is the idea that individuals will seek out news and stories that “reinforce their beliefs.”

If we are feeling negative about our surroundings and the directions of our lives, the theory goes, we will click on stories that confirm bad news, because that will give us proof that we are right.

But now that we know we can’t help ourselves, and regardless of what we say about liking positive news, we just can’t stop clicking on bad news?

We should also know thatwe CAN help ourselves,and we can change that habit.

One of the simplest ways to start clawing back our tendency towards the negative and our fascination with the sensational is to activelyclick differently. You don’t have to be a hero,or be out there making or reporting on the good news stories.

The first and easiest thing you really need to do is to click on some positive news stories. The more you click, the more they’ll get written.