Why We Love Bad News More Than Good News

Is the media negative? Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report.

Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival.

In his book, Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos explains that if the news is about a small neighborhood of 500 or 5,000, then the possibility that something unusual has happened is low. Unusual things don’t happen to individual people very often. That’s why very local news like a neighborhood newsletters tends to have less bad news. But in a large city of 1 million, dramatic and negative incidents happen all the time. But most people watch national or worldwide media where news reports come in from large cities at a large scale, so the prevalence of negative stories increase.

read more:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201411/why-we-love-bad-news-more-good-news

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