Psychologically, these preferences for negativity can be explained by people’s built-in mechanisms to scan their environment for threats (Soroka and McAdams Citation2015). Overall, compared to positive information, negative news is considered more appealing as it is seen as unambiguous, consensual, unexpected, dramatic, sensational, entertaining, eye-catching, interesting, and short-dated (Lengauer, Esser, and Berganza Citation2012). In this selection process, people are found to be drawn to negative news-i.e., negativity bias (Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, and Polavin Citation2020). In an online media environment with an abundance of news choices, audiences need to rely on certain cues to maneuver through the overload of information to decide what news to read. Not only news media are skewed toward the negative, but also audiences’ news selection can often be characterized by several biases. The current study is specifically interested in the demand-side of negative and event-driven news as digital audiences are more and more in control of their news diets. Such worldviews are at odds with the principles of a well-functioning democracy: They may trap people in irrational spirals of cynicism and impede the rational exchange of arguments between citizens. For example, negatively biased coverage can induce irrational fear perceptions (Romer, Jamieson, and Aday Citation2003), lower general well-being (Boukes and Vliegenthart Citation2017), and increase support for radical right-wing political parties (Thesen Citation2018). Media’s tendency to present the negative and exceptional as reality can cultivate a distorted worldview among its audiences. The infrequency of incidents paradoxically explains the level of news coverage and therewith isolated and negative events are mistakenly presented as daily reality (Jacobs et al. In this predominant focus on negativity, sensational and exceptional events often gain disproportionate news attention (Entman Citation2007).
Overall, good news is seen as synonymous with no news as negativity is believed to be more attention-grabbing and therewith garners the highest audience ratings and number of clicks (Lengauer, Esser, and Berganza Citation2012 Soroka, Fournier, and Nir Citation2019). In their overly negative and event-driven reporting, news media are commonly found to portray a biased reality. This study is the first to document that NML interventions can potentially have merits as a tool to combat negativity bias in online news selection. Exposure to NML interventions concerning negativity bias or clickbait was found to mitigate this negativity bias in news selection, especially for those who already hold a pessimistic outlook. Findings show that those participants who hold a more pessimistic outlook on crime in society tend to confirm this worldview by self-selecting into more negative crime news. A selective-exposure experiment ( N = 612) monitored participants’ self-selection of crime news after exposure to NML interventions.
#When reality falls apart how to
In a next step, news media literacy (NML) literature is consulted to explore how to counter this tendency to, via news selection, confirm an overly negative and distorted worldview. Do people with a more pessimistic worldview also select more like-minded news that confirms their negative-sometimes irrational-outlook on reality? This study theorizes that, based on the negativity and confirmation biases in audience digital news selection, a pessimistic outlook increases the likelihood of self-selection of more negative and episodic headlines over positive and thematic news.
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