Good and the bad and the masala or the NEWS
If I say I have good and a piece of bad news there is a great chance that you will choose the bad news first. People think that they may have chosen the bad to compensate for the effect of the bad with the good. But, there is much to it, the negative events affect us more than the good ones; a bad event during our morning drive, a burnt toast, a stain of coffee, a broken and imperfect omelet can kill a lot of our happy time and these things occupy most of our psychic space. The problem is not the occurrence of the bad event, the problem is the way we handle it. We feel pain but our body has no receptive mechanism to feel the absence of it. This skewed wiring of the brain leads to negativity bias, hundreds of double-blinded research confirm the effect. Negativity affects in a way that we try to avoid negativity so much so that in cases it leads to imposter syndrome. We put all our efforts into avoiding negative images and put every effort into building a good one. A six-month baby can spot an angry face but the same baby is very slow at picking a happy one. The same happens to the adults they can identify angry people in the crowd but not the happy and contented ones until and unless they are smiling or laughing.
The pathway of controlling the negative emotions and detecting the same are controlled by Amygdala and humans have trained their brain at picking up negativity so well that it takes 20ms that is literally no time to permanently store a bad memory in our brain. On the contrary, it takes a full 12 seconds cycle for a positive memory to travel to the permanent storage space. This arrangement has not happened in a day, our ancestors have paid much for it and so many would have lost their lives just to establish the fact that a creeper is not as poisonous as a snake and the sound of every crushed dried leaf is not made by some predator. The majority of the dreams that we see are negative; falling from a height, missing a train, seeing a snake, drowning, missing a flight or a bus, a ghost attack, fight with someone, all the teeth fallen on the ground are a few of the most common dreams. Our brain is so biased for the negativity that 74% of words in English describe negativity in one or the other way.
Daniel Kahneman in his review of literature has quoted the whole effect as “loss aversion” behavior. But, now as the lions, the bear, and the rattlesnakes are not our neighbors then the instinct that kept us alive for thousands of years has started acting adversely. As said by Harvey Dent that “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. Likewise, a negative bias is now affecting our intimate relationships, the social structure and it is destabilizing the peace.
In the year 1992, Gottman found a formula that could predict the expected cases of divorce with more than 90% accuracy by spending 15 mins with the couple. It is like predicting at max 5 sixes in an over by a particular batsman. A way to peep into the future. The ratio of the negative VS the positive is that we need at least 5 positive things to compensate for one negative thing to live a happy life. It takes 20 positive incidents to compensate for 1 negative incident to maintain a harmonious relationship with the spouse. It takes 5 or 6 positive incidents to retain a good employee.
Setting all that aside, let's now bring news and media into the picture. One of the reasons that newspapers, tv shows, debates are filled up with negative information. Recent cases have emerged where news anchors, filmmakers, content creators have exploited this particular vulnerability to the fullest. The fabrication of facts, exaggeration of information, overgeneralization of incidents are a few of the ways to achieve the same. The creators achieve it by infusing satire, parody, hyperlobe exaggeration, and sometimes misinformation to give meaning to the political rhetoric. The election of Trump, Brexit, Islamophobia, Saffronisation all creates a deeper sense of negative bias by utilizing the vulnerable and predictive functioning of the brain. The horrible and fearful news of the end of Democracy, Drugs, and Bollywood, Modi and Dictator, Trump and rigged election, China and Covid 19 strain, News and Fallacy all have the subtle mix of facts and masala to play with our cognitive bias. There are many other interlinked problems with the bias, out of all the problems, the propagation of biased agenda, terms written between the lines are the most important one. The social media and prevalence of personalized content suggestion algorithm make this bias so strong that no one even bothers to check for the facts and figures related to the bias.
In a paper titled “The complex dynamics of wishful thinking,” Dr. Brown states that the propagation of fake news and negativity is not the only problem, the other problem could be that every news no matter how accurately reported will be considered fake news. No matter how good a product is it will always be considered a sponsored and paid promotion. The concept of reality will vanish from society. Remember Alicia Sierra, Money Heist Season 3, she used the same trick.
A data of 165 independent surveys state that the news preferences have not changed in the last 20 years and there is a jump of 30% in viewership due to the online presence. Politics, foreign affairs, patriotism, sexuality, god, and religion are among the top preferences, science, and technology, health, and services, morality and development are in the least preference sections.
Few articles published by NYT clearly state that most of the crimes are reported without an actual ground survey which leads to a fabricated story and a biased viewpoint. All that we see is not correct, all that we know is not correct and all that we believe is also not correct. The era of viral news fabrication forces the creator to overexploit the survival mechanisms of our cognitive ability. Hence it becomes the prime job of the viewer and the reader to think and validate before raising a point that could harm social harmony.