The Tyranny of Emotion - Study
I hate to break this to you, but… the world is generally better and safer than you think. At the very least, things have gotten better over time. If you could choose to travel back to any point in human history where most people have the best chances at safety and prosperity, the data says you should stay here in the present. Sorry about that!
News stories about terrorism, violence, crime, disease outbreaks, natural disasters, and other potential threats become increasingly negative, inaccurate, and hysterical when passed from person to person, according to research by the University of Warwick.
Led by Professor Thomas Hills in Warwick’s Department of Psychology, the study finds that even drawing the public’s attention to unbiased, neutral facts does not mitigate this contagion of panic. Sometimes, the real epidemic is a negative worldview.
This is the first research ever to investigate the impact of dread on the social amplification of threat, and to examine the re-exposure of balanced information on the social diffusion of messages.
The results have important implications for contemporary society – with the constant proliferation of news stories (both legitimate and fake), rumors, retweets, and messages across social media.
The researchers analyzed 154 participants on social media. They were split into 14 chains of 8 people, with the first person in each chain reading balanced, factual news articles, and writing a message to the next person about the story, the recipient writing a new message for the next person, and so on.
The sixth person in each chain was given the message from the previous person, alongside the original neutral news story.
In every chain, stories about dreaded topics became increasingly more negative, and biased toward panic and fear as it was passed from person to person – and crucially, this effect was not mitigated when the original unbiased facts were reintroduced. The original neutral information had virtually no effect on reducing people’s increasingly negative outlook.
Basically, the old “telephone game” can serve as an amplifier of bad news. Comparing the original and final messages, and even intermediate messages, finds some messages will become unrecognizable after only a few steps. This shows how easily information can become corrupted by indirect communication. The game has been used in schools to simulate the spread of gossip and its possible harmful effects. The University of Warwick study shows this message corruption tends to become negative.
The Causes of death in the US chart above is from OurWorldInData.org. On the left are the percentage breakdowns of the actual causes of death in order of the likelihood of occurrence, leading with Heart Disease (30.2%), Cancer (29.5%), Road Incidents (7.8%), Lower Respiratory Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Stroke, and Diabetes. Suicide is near the bottom of that list (1.8%). Terrorism and Homicide added together comprise 0.91% of total actual deaths. However, New York Times and The Guardian reporting on Homicide and Terrorism constitute about 58% of their coverage, while Heart Disease and Cancer combined constitute about 15%.
Professor Thomas Hills from the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology commented:
“Society is an amplifier for risk. This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats.
"It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction.”
Human Progress has generally been improving even if it isn’t a popular story on the news, especially when those stories are interested in pushing a “gun epidemic” narrative instead of looking at the actual data.
America Is Relatively Safe and Tolerant. You are twice as likely to be struck by lightning in the U.S. than be a victim of a mass shooting.
David Rozado published a paper where he describes a chronological (2000–2019) analysis of sentiment and emotion in 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets popular in the United States. They used Transformer language models fine-tuned for the detection of sentiment (positive, negative) and emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, neutral) to automatically label the headlines.
The results show an increase of sentiment negativity (downward slope away from positive sentiment) in headlines across written news media since the year 2000 even though things have gotten better.
Again, sorry to be the bearer of good news.