Why Fear is Winning

Fear is winning the current political and information war. In this post, I'm going to tell you why. Part 2 will address what you can do to fight back.

Point 1: Humans are emotional animals

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who make clear decisions, but we couldn't be more wrong. Research has found that up to 95% of our decisions are emotionally driven.

Our emotions evolved as survival tools to help us navigate an uncertain environment where all we had to cope with were our wits and our guts. And because of this, they will trigger much sooner than the logical portion of our brains. There’s no time for thinking when a tiger springs out of the jungle.

Yet we make hundreds of decisions every day, and we’re not constantly walking around terrified of tigers. What does any of this have to do with fear?

Point 2: Emotions create subconscious action readiness

Let’s reframe our emotions as tendencies toward certain actions, and our emotional state as one of “action readiness”.

Over the course of your life, you’ve learned many things, educated yourself on certain topics, made choices, experienced the outcome of those choices. As a result, you've developed a predisposition toward certain decisions. All of that learning has taken a lot of mental processing, and the next time a similar decision comes up it’s much easier to respond in the same way you have in the past rather than to go back into research and exploration mode.

Put another way, your brain wants to eliminate the processing load that comes with novel stimuli. It relies on the action readiness created by your emotions to do so. Continually carrying uncertainty, doubt, or worry is much more mentally and physically demanding than simply reacting and instantly relieving those emotions.

Point 3: Fear is our most powerful emotion

Psychologists have identified a phenomenon called negativity bias, which states that humans tend to feel “negative” emotions like fear much more intensely than positive emotions like calm and satisfaction. The theory goes that we evolved to fixate on our negative emotions because those emotions helped us survive in our early history.

And while we live in an era of one-click grocery delivery and warm safe beds rather than threatening tigers, our core emotions - and how they affect our decisions - remain the same.

Point 4: Media competition has created a fear-centric infosphere

The media landscape has become incredibly competitive due to the digital era's massive flood of content:

• Television produces an estimated 88 million hours (about 10,039 years) of programming each year in the US alone, but broadcast TV audiences are declining
• YouTube is estimated to have more than 100 million channels, and currently delivers 21% of all TV streaming content
• YouTube creators upload 500 hours of video content on the platform every minute. Which means, in a given year YouTube creates 262.8 million hours of programming, or nearly three times as much as broadcast television
• Podcasters publish somewhere north of 25,000 episodes every day

In a hyper-competitive online environment that depends on attention in order to generate advertising revenue, where ownership and shareholders demand ever-increasing returns while every outlet competes with every other media property in the world, the media has become locked into an ever-increasing cycle of negativity because the only way to capture more attention is by amplifying stories of danger and conflict.

In the last 20 years, headlines designed to provoke anger or fear rose by 104% and 150% respectively, culminating in 87% of U.S. headlines during 2020 being negative. And when we look beyond just news, we find that negative social media posts are much more likely to go viral.?

Bad news flourishes because the media has to keep you watching. Fear is the strongest lever it has.

Point 5: Thinking requires time. Emotions don't.

Numerous studies of time-limited decision-making have shown that the less time we have to consider a message or choice, the less time we’ll spend actually thinking about it and the more we’ll fall back on what we already “know”, which are our emotions. ?

Couple this tendency with the power of first impressions, which researchers call "primacy". Primacy is so strong that it can cause people to cling to misinformation even more tightly after they receive the truth. Studies have provided participants with mock news stories that contained both misleading claims from politicians and later corrections. These researchers found that people tended to believe the misinformation even more strongly after reading the correction.

Conclusion

So, we find ourselves bombarded with thousands of messages every day, the majority of which are negative. This bombardment has put us in a heightened negative emotional state, making us less likely to think about any single message and more likely to simply react in a way we always have. And when we are constantly afraid and primed for action without thought, we behave in exactly the way you'd expect.

Fear craves strength and security. It rejects rational argument. It acts in perceived self-defense at all times, because everything is a threat. And fear demands control in order to limit these perceived threats.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If so, read on for part 2, where we'll discuss how to counteract fear-based messaging.