There's a reason fear runs our lives. Let's not let it win

[Nevilledog]

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/theres-a-reason-fear-runs-our-lives-lets-not-let-it-win/article_38d307fe-bc9f-11ef-8422-3790078cea41.html

One-hundred-thousand years ago, letting fear guide our daily decisions probably wasn’t a bad idea. Don’t eat that poisonous plant! Remember where those scary predators hang out! Wait, what’s behind that tree?! Run!

We are evolutionarily hardwired to prioritize emotional content, especially scary and maddening stuff. This powerful tendency — called the negativity bias — is universal and, for most of human history, worked in our favour (hence the “hardwired” bit). But in today’s chaotic information environment, this propensity is being exploited: by the algorithms that decide what content we see; by marketers to sell products and brands; by politicians to garner votes; and by state actors to create distrust and divide us. It is also facilitating the profound distortion of our reality, allowing our beliefs and behaviours to be informed more by scary lies than nuanced facts.

Sex may sell (more evolution at play), but long term, fear and rage increasingly shape our worldview. We are experiencing a feardemic. And this is sad, regressive and deeply problematic.

Indeed, negative emotions now rule our information environment. A study published in 2022 looked at more than twenty million headlines over a two-decade span and found headlines with negative sentiments (anger, fear, disgust and sadness) have increased substantially and those with a neutral vibe or expressing joy (more joy, please!) have decreased. Given that other research has shown that negative and scary headlines — “if it bleeds it leads” has long been an axiom in the news media — outperform positive headlines and that people pay more attention to them this is hardly surprising. But now that tendency has been supercharged. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say, as a 2023 study concluded, negativity rules our news consumption.

And those negative and rage-filled headlines are often all that people read. Most news consumers share content online after only reading the headline. A 2024 analysis of 35 million news links on social media concluded that 75 per cent were shared without the link being clicked on and read. And, yep, the available evidence tells us that negative news is shared more often. Bottom line: when it comes to news, scary, short and simple dominates.

*snip*