Negativity Bias Isn't Going Away

But here’s the good news. (Plus a holiday note from our editors.)

(Photo by Jose Carlos Fajardo/MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images.)

What a year. 2024 was heralded as the “year of elections” and it certainly lived up to its name. Around the world, incumbent parties were booted out of office by irate electorates. Some of these changes we should celebrate, while others are of deep concern. For many of us, this also felt like the first truly post-COVID year and the reemergence of normal life—even as America’s national politics continues to move in troubling directions.

Persuasion has also seen a lot of changes. We recently crossed 60,000 subscribers. We published two new series on the crisis in universities and on philosophical liberalism. And we expanded our family of publications with the launch of Yascha’s column and the addition of Frank Fukuyama’s American Purpose to our site, including the Bookstack podcast and a regular column by Frank. We’re so grateful that they put their trust in us to host their work.

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Finally, to end 2024 on a positive note, we’re publishing this article by our recent intern Andrew Xu, who explores the pernicious phenomenon of negativity bias and showcases some of the good-news stories you may have missed recently. See you all in 2025!

– The editorial team.

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Imagine that you are sitting in an airplane seat. The flight attendant has come around selling snacks for you to buy. “There are two options available,” the flight attendant says. You might be interested in their baby carrots, or you could choose a bag of delicious potato chips. The flight attendant goes to every passenger on the plane, offering them the same two choices for a flight snack.

Naturally, you and the vast majority of passengers choose the bag of potato chips. After the flight, the airline looks at the results and realizes it would be more profitable to keep the potato chips as an option but toss the carrots. So the next time a flight rolls around, the attendants offer to sell either potato chips or brownies instead. The cycle then repeats, but this time people choose brownies. This feedback loop keeps going until the only thing on offer becomes a sugary dessert.

This is the hypothetical scenario posed by Carey Morewedge, a marketing professor at Boston University, in an interview with journalist Dylan Matthews. But while this “algorithmically run airline” analogy may be hypothetical, it captures a tendency within journalism that is very real: negativity bias.

There is an old quip about mainstream journalism: “if it bleeds, it leads.” Negative news gets more traction than positive news, for the same reasons that airplane passengers would prefer potato chips to baby carrots: human beings are attracted to the things that are bad for us because they are enticing in the heat of the moment.

In a study conducted by Nature, researchers found that “individuals are especially likely to consume political and economic news when it is negative.” We want to see the things that are upsetting to us even if they lead to a systemic bias in information reporting, or if they cause us to become more neurotic because of the disproportionately negative light in which we view the world.

And if news stories refuse to conform to our expectations of the world? Then they don’t get as much traction. The same study found that framing stories in a more positive light (or simply focusing more on positive stories) makes people less likely to consume that content. In the words of editor Nilay Patel, “it is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain.”

Thanks to negativity bias, there have been plenty of times when unambiguously good news has not been presented as such by news organizations. Sometimes they aren’t covered as much as they should be (who knew that black incarceration rates have fallen significantly over the past few years?). Even worse, there are times when unambiguously good news is presented in a lukewarm, or even negative, light. In general, positive news is more likely to be presented with caveats and trepidation than negative news.

Perhaps the biggest problem with negativity bias is that it makes fatalism far easier. If you follow a news diet that consistently presents you with tons of problems about the world, and rarely shows you when real improvements are made, it’s easy to feel a sense of unearned hopelessness about all that’s going on. But if we think back to the most successful political movements of the recent past—Obama’s campaign comes to mind—many of them were premised on a sense of hope that the world could get better. They focused on times in history when humanity could solve the problems they were dealt, and filled people with a sense of optimism about how much better the world could become.

Nowadays, negativity bias is so bad that prominent journalists such as Atlantic writer Derek Thompson consider it to be the greatest bias in journalism: more important than any bias towards the left or the right, or towards any other political ideology that’s currently in vogue.

With all that in mind, let’s close 2024 by spotlighting some of the good that has happened recently:

• Income inequality is decreasing thanks to the pandemic, which, on net, led to an increase in wages for lower earners.

• Murder rates are going back down after a pandemic bump.

• Traffic fatalities are also down for the second consecutive year.

• The overemphasis on identity politics that ran rampant throughout many left-coded institutions has started to decline, leaving the American left in a much more reasonable position.

• Average college tuition costs are beginning to decrease.

• The U.S. economy somehow managed to avoid the recession it was bracing for since its bout of post-pandemic inflation (a recession that many economists had been predicting for a while).

• Global poverty rates have continued their trend of decline that’s been ongoing for years.

• This applies to the world’s child mortality rates as well.

• The worst-case scenarios regarding climate change are now much, much less likely than they were ten years ago. In fact, transitions in clean energy have done way more than many thought possible for mitigating some of the potential consequences of climate change. We’re not out of the woods just yet, but there is more room for celebration than many think.

Andrew Xu is a recent graduate of McGill University and hosts the podcast “Frames of Space.”

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