Department of Communication and Media, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Sep 17;116(38):18888-18892. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1908369116. Epub 2019 Sep 3.
What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly to negative than positive information. "Negativity biases" in human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stimuli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level variation in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results make clear the pervasiveness of negativity biases on average, they help account for the tendency for audience-seeking news around the world to be predominantly negative. Insofar as our results highlight individual-level variation, however, they highlight the potential for more positive content, and suggest that there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic wisdom that "if it bleeds, it leads."
负面新闻内容为何如此盛行？一种解释可能在于人类对负面信息比对正面信息的反应更为强烈。人类认知和行为中的“负面偏见”已有充分记录，但现有研究基于英美小样本和与我们的政治世界只有间接关系的刺激物。这项工作相应地报告了一项涉及 17 个国家、6 个大陆的实验研究的结果，该研究考察了对真实视频新闻内容的生理心理反应。结果提供了迄今为止最全面的跨国负面偏见展示，但也突显了对新闻内容反应的相当大的个体差异。由于我们的结果清楚地表明了平均存在负面偏见，因此有助于解释为什么世界各地寻求观众的新闻往往主要是负面的。然而，由于我们的结果强调了个体差异，因此也突出了更积极内容的可能性，并表明有理由重新考虑传统的新闻智慧，即“有血有肉，就有新闻”。
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