Negativity bias and the news: The psychology behind doomscrolling & what can you do about it?
Why we don’t vibe with the news anymore - in a nutshell
News feels overwhelmingly negative, causing emotional fatigue and avoidance.
Our brains are wired for negativity bias, making us focus more on bad news than good.
The modern media ecosystem overloads us with global problems we aren’t built to process.
Positive news fades fast, while negative stories stick—fueling distorted perspectives.
Constructive journalism offers a better path: covering real issues and the solutions.
The fix? Be intentional with your news intake: stay informed, not overwhelmed.
There is an old saying in the news broadcasting world, “If it bleeds, it leads.”🩸
Anyone alive in today’s world will tell you that the news is negative, that something is always ‘bleeding’. A significant portion of people, often between 35% to 40% globally, and up to 70% in some countries, find consuming news to be a negative emotional experience, citing feelings like sadness, anger, anxiety, or mood deterioration. I’m sure this describes someone we all know, or even ourselves, and it has led to many people avoiding the news entirely.
Paradoxically, most people still want to be informed and up-to-date on what is happening in the world. How do we walk this razor’s edge of being informed and avoiding the existential dread that often accompanies the news?
There’s no denying that there is a negativity bias in our news; a cynical interpretation would claim that negative stories get more clicks, more eyeballs, and therefore are sought out and amplified. And that may be partially true, especially when we rely on social media algorithms to keep us informed. But, the inverse may also be true.
Negative news dominates because, despite our best intentions, we can’t help but focus on the negative. Some studies have shown that people are 49% more likely to read something more negative than something more positive. And it’s not just conditioning, it is hardwired into our brains and it ain’t leaving any time soon. Let’s find out why.
The psychology behind negativity bias 🔮
Negativity bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that we all experience every day. What it means is that we focus more on the negative, and that negative outcomes often affect us more than equally positive outcomes. This is an evolutionary adaptation that has kept us alive and made us the dominant species on the planet.
In our ancient past, the need to pay attention to negative stimuli could mean the difference between life and death. Naturally, caution saved lives, and evolution has selected for those genes. The one’s who were more aware of the threats in their environment most likely lived long enough to reproduce, and their offspring continued that vigilance. While those ancestors who weren’t as observant as their peers often ended up in the belly of a sabre-tooth tiger or were poisoned because they bit into the wrong fruit.
The point is that this focus on negative stimuli is hard-wired into our brains and cannot simply be turned off, no matter how much we want to. Think of your last performance review, or your last school report; what do you remember more? The good feedback, or the ‘areas for improvement’?
Studies have shown, and there are exceptions to this, that even though many people will say that they want more positivity in their news, their behavior will actively contradict that wish as they seek out and focus on negative stories. That’s how strong this psychological trait is, and it is in direct conflict with our modern lifestyle.
Ancient brains, modern world 🧠
By almost every metric, this is one of the best times to be alive on planet Earth for a human. Child mortality is the lowest it’s ever been, there are fewer people below the poverty line than ever before, and advances in health and technology have ensured longer, more comfortable lives where people are freer to express their identities than ever before.
Despite a few tiny troubled areas (the possibility of nuclear war, global warming, etc.) many societal trends are going in a positive direction (at the time of this writing). However, if you ask a random person on the street how things are in the world, especially in a developed country, you’d probably get an overwhelmingly negative response. And it’s easy to see why if you look at their social media feed.
You may be thinking, “If everything’s so good, why do I still feel so bad? Why is my picture of reality so negative?” And to some degree, you’d be right to think that.
This is because our information echo system has expanded dramatically in recent decades. Thanks to smartphones, the internet, and social media, the sheer amount of information that we ingest daily has skyrocketed.
And this change is accelerating.
A YouGov survey (via Our World in Data) asked: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” The vast majority (70%) said worse, only a tiny fraction (<5%) said it's improving. This pessimism toward both the present and future is widespread, particularly in wealthier nations. Ipsos’ “Perils of Perception” across 40+ countries found that people commonly overestimate negative trends, unemployment, minority populations, etc., and underestimate how happy or tolerant their societies are.
We’ve come to a collision point between the breakneck pace of exponential technological growth and the slow and meticulous process of organic evolution. We simply can’t keep up. Of course, we can learn all the new tricks of each technology, but our deeply entrenched psychological make-up changes slowly over millennia and does not update and redesign every year like an iPhone.
Keeping up is not the only issue either; it is keeping perspective, too.
We are suddenly inundated with global issues in never-before-experienced levels of detail; some of it is important, and much of it is arbitrary. And our brains, which are still hardwired to look for threats, latch on to all the negative stories they can find. And because our phones are always with us, problems that are far away trigger the same anxiety response as a clear and present threat in our immediate environment.
Our evolutionarily beneficial threat detection system is working against us in this highly connected world and causing us to have warped perspectives, especially in the developed world, where dangers are fewer, farther between, and less lethal. Because material threats are scarce, people have more time to obsessively fixate on ever more abstract threats.
There are many upsides to this of course. Because of the power and connectivity of the internet, some of these new societal abilities for activism and awareness have seen positive results.
Nevertheless, our brains are not built to process the world’s misery on a daily basis. Therefore, many opt to tune out or risk becoming radicalised because of a lost sense of perspective that is created by too much slanted and negative news.
The problem with scale ⚖
Many complain that there isn’t enough coverage of ‘positive news’ and that they might consider tuning back in if the news were more balanced. But is that possible? Can the positive signals be found in the noise of negativity that pervades so much of online interaction?
Good news can be just as powerful as bad news. On the upper end of the ‘impact’ spectrum, I’d be willing to bet my life that this is true. For example, if a cure for cancer were discovered today, it would be on the front page, landing page, and every other page of every news organization by tomorrow morning, no doubt about it. But positive news has a much quicker falloff in terms of its effects when the scale goes down, while negative news seems to stay potent well below its relevance.
We fixate on tragedy, scandal (think Depp vs Heard), and crime, even when they don’t impact our lives. Meanwhile, life-changing charities or inspiring innovations get little attention. It’s the “reality TV-fication” of news.
Behavioral economics shows that the emotional impact of news flattens as stories become more positive, similar to diminishing sensitivity in prospect theory.
Prospect theory shows we respond more strongly to initial gains than to repeated ones. A single uplifting story might move us, the third one, less so.
Hedonic adaptation means we return to our emotional baseline quickly, even after good news. Lottery winners reported only slightly more day-to-day happiness than non-winners months after their win. What’s the news relevance? Frequent good news stories (e.g. viral feel-goods) quickly lose their power to elevate mood over time.
Would you like some more facts, figures, surveys, and studies?
📈 Engagement Metrics for Positive vs. Negative News
A 2021 study by Boczkowski, Mitchelstein & Matassi found that:
Negative news generated significantly more engagement (shares, comments) across social media.
Positive news had shorter shelf life—people moved on faster.
Eye-tracking and EEG studies (Soroka et al., 2019):
Participants showed stronger physical and neurological responses to negative headlines than to positive ones.
The emotional activation flattened quickly for repeated positive content.
🗣️ Survey data
Reuters Institute Digital News Report (2022):
~40% of respondents worldwide reported actively avoiding news, citing emotional exhaustion—particularly from repetitively negative stories.
Ironically, too much positive or trivial news also led to disengagement, as it was seen as inauthentic or irrelevant.
Summary analogy🎢
Think of positive news like sugar:
A small dose brings a burst of energy (or emotion).
Repeated doses quickly flatten the effect and may even backfire if perceived as overdone or insincere.
“Such negativity! Such futility!”😖 What now?
OK, let’s pull up out of this nose dive of despair, it doesn’t all have to be doom and gloom. As individuals, there is much we can do to alleviate the stress that a largely negative news experience gives us.
We can realise that the negative emotions that result from engaging with the news are not emanating from the news programs, it comes from the events themselves. And it's a big world, a lot of bad stuff happens everywhere. But we don’t need to focus on all of it at once, so it is OK to tune out from things that don’t directly effect your life or interests from time to time.
And the opposite is also true, it’s a big world, and a lot of good stuff happens too, its just not sensationalised so much. But we can rest easy knowing that those stories are out there.
And if you want to defy the bias and spread some good news, then we have a satisfying answer for you. Support constructive journalism. This is a solutions-focused news method that tries to break the culture of conflict that is “if it bleeds, it leads.”
If you can’t be positive, at least be constructive 🚧
Let’s consider the alternative to the negativity biased news world. Yes, the news shouldn’t be all puff piece and no substance. But should it be THIS negative? Is there a way to strike a different balance? Many organizations believe so and are working to create news that has a more positive outlook despite the diminishing returns of good news focused programming. The Good News Network, The Optimist Daily, Nice News, and Future Crunch make up a few good examples of this approach.
A study into the sentiment of network news coverage between 1990 and 2018 has shown that many regular news organizations actually already have a healthy balance in this regard. The coverage of an average episode often contains (and often ends on) positive news stories, but the consumers barely notice. The negativity bias strikes again. The study also argues that people are more drawn to bad news, but surprising or unusual good news can still capture attention by tapping into our bias for novelty.
That being said, when you consider that journalists are people with their own negativity bias, too, then it’s easy to envision a doubling effect in the negativity bias. It’s not just the consumers of news that select for negativity, but those who gather the news as well. That’s why constructive journalism is such a breath of fresh air.
It’s all about the solutions: introducing constructive journalism
Constructive journalism emerged in the early 2010s as a response to the negativity bias and sensationalism common in traditional news. Pioneered by journalists like Ulrik Haagerup in Denmark, the movement aims to complement critical reporting by also highlighting solutions, progress, and context, focusing not just on what's wrong but also on what’s being done about it. And that is what differentiates it from just plain old good news, it still tackles the important and sometimes dire stuff but delivers a unique twist by also including the solutions. And that last bit of detail is the differentiating factor.
This active choice of the journalist to shift the focus to the solution while not ignoring the problem is what we really need. Its objective is to inform and empower audiences rather than overwhelm or discourage them, encouraging civic engagement, hope, and resilience.
Constructive journalism draws from principles in positive psychology and solutions journalism, seeking to create a more balanced, accurate, and forward-looking news ecosystem.
Interested in trying out the solution approach? Podego is working on it!
At Podego, we hope to be part of the solution and not the problem. With our AI-based news aggregation, we hope to strip the bias away from the facts. But we know that this is not enough; that’s why we’re building features that help to foster positive engagement and positive outcomes. More on that in near future (we’re talking about this year August, click here to be the first to know when it’s out).
For now, don’t take on the world’s problems every time you open the news; focus on what you can and learn what you must, but always remember, the news will always be the news, the overload is the real problem, not the bias, so manage your intake. A healthy amount of negativity bias is what got us to this point after all.
