How news distorts our worldview and ruins our health

The more you watch and read the news, the more distorted your view of the world. Sounds scary and implausible? Edition with the BBC figured out why this is happening.

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Before the tragedy happened, Alison Holman worked on a completely ordinary study of the mental health of Americans. And on April 15, 2013, when hundreds of runners crossed the finish line of the annual Boston marathon one after another, two homemade bombs were detonated with an interval of 10 seconds.

Three people, including an 8-year-old boy, were killed. Hundreds were injured. 16 people have lost limbs.

The world mourned, and the media, meanwhile, in terrible details covered what had happened. And this coverage did not last a day or two, or even a month, but years, if we consider the subsequent court hearings.

Images of the moment of the explosion, smoke, confusion and horror of those present were broadcast many times on television. Newspapers published scary photos: bloodstained sidewalks injured in torn clothes.

And it so happened that Holman and his colleagues from the University of California at Irvine literally on the eve finished collecting data on the mental state of about 5 thousand Americans. Scientists decided to look after a few weeks, how the state of respondents has changed in connection with the Boston tragedy.

It is easy to guess that the mental health of those who were present at the scene of the terrorist act or suffered from it, to put it mildly, has not improved. And, by the way, among the participants in the study were those who were at the scene of the explosions.

But here is an unexpected turn: the psyche of those respondents who were not present at the scene of the tragedy personally, but subsequently watched the news on this topic for six or more hours a day over the next week, suffered even more.

The high level of stress was not directly related to the fact that people closely knew someone who died, was injured or was present at the site of the explosions.

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“It was kind of an epiphany for us,” says Homan. “I think people greatly underestimate the impact of news.”

It seems that the news is much more than a harmless list of what happened and the facts that journalists found. News sneaks into our subconscious and affects our lives in the most bizarre ways.

They can change our attitude towards immigrants, they can invade our dreams, prevent us from seeing the real risk of a particular disease, and form a view of what is happening in another country. And even able to affect the health of the economy of the entire state.

There is more and more evidence that the emotional effects of consuming news can affect our health, increasing the chances of a heart attack or disease in the coming years.

And most importantly, all this requires just a few hours of news consumption per day. How does this happen? As soon as the first news began to arrive from China about the mysterious new coronavirus, the ratings of information television programs and the number of their viewers began to rise, eventually reaching record numbers.

And this is understandable: millions of people scrupulously followed government briefings, constantly updated data on the number of infected and dead, and announcements of new rules of conduct during quarantine.

However, it’s 2020, and television news is far from the only or even the main source of information for us.

Podcasts, streaming services, social networks - everyone is ready to send you notifications about updates many times a day. Your friends send you links to materials that they liked and shocked.

It is not surprising that, having cooked in this news broth all day, in the evening you cannot calm down for a long time and close your eyes.

According to data from 2018, received long before the pandemic forced us to retire at home, the average American spent about 11 hours daily looking at a TV, computer or smartphone. Many of us take our phone or tablet to bed with us, going to bed.

As we understand, with such a lifestyle it is impossible to avoid information about events taking place in the world.

So we are programmed

One possible reason why news affects us so strongly is what psychologists long ago called negativity bias: We pay much more attention to the bad things that happen around us.

It is believed that this addiction has developed to protect us from dangers. It explains why a person’s failure is more noticeable than his positive side, why loss affects us more than gaining, and why fear motivates us more than new perspectives.

Governments are often guided by this when developing particular policies, when they need to decide whether to use carrots or sticks. Unfortunately, negative incentives work more effectively in society.

The tendency of mankind to negate, perhaps, explains the fact that news is rarely a pleasant reading.

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One day in 2014, the Russian website “City Reporter” decided to conduct an experiment and reported only good news all day, ignoring the bad.

The readership fell sharply that day, by almost two-thirds - no one is interested in good news. As the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, the newspapers of Utopia would be terribly boring.

How does this extra dose of negativity affect our views?

Scientists have long known that large sections of the population tend not to expect anything good from the future when it comes to the prospects for the country's economy - although in reality such a forecast has no relation to reality.

Business cycles (repeated fluctuations in economic activity, from recessions to expansions) are one of the cornerstones of modern economics, proven by decades of research and experience.

Thus, the opinion that everything will always be worse in the future is simply wrong. And, in addition, potentially harmful. Because if people think that in five years they will have neither work nor money, they will not invest in the economy.

Taken to extremes, our collective pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and there is some evidence that the news—or rather, the way it is reported—is partly to blame.

For example, a 2003 study found that economic news is more likely to be bad than good, and such news coverage is an important indicator of people's expectations.

Another study in the Netherlands confirmed that economic news coverage often draws a much darker picture, at odds with the real economic situation.

Such constant negativity leads to the formation in society of an incorrect picture of the health of the country's economy.

Not so long ago, the authors of one study even suggested that media coverage of the news increases periods of economic growth or economic downturn.

The news seems to accidentally bend our view of reality - and not necessarily for the better. Here's another example, this time about our perception of risk.

Take international tourism. As a rule, people are not really eager for those countries where political instability reigns, a war is on or the risk of becoming a victim of terrorism is high.

In some cases, the news becomes a source of direct advice on this matter by publishing government recommendations - such as during a global pandemic.

But even when there are no official recommendations not to go somewhere (and there is not even a rational reason not to go), the news can affect our subconscious, leading to an erroneous view of the world and events.

One of the reasons for this can be considered the so-called effect of framing, framing, the context in which a fact or event is placed.

For example, a drug that is “effective 95% of the time” is perceived much more positively than the same drug that “does not work 5% of the time,” even though it is the same drug. But - and this is also not noticed today - we do not always think rationally.

You can write that “the terrorist attack was carried out by al-Qaeda and its associated radical Islamist groups,” and this will sound much more alarming than “a local separatist group,” although it will be about the same thing. Sometimes such subtle factors can have life and death consequences.

In a 2014 study, it turned out: people generally believe that those types of cancer that are more widely covered in the media (like brain tumors) are more common than they actually are. And, accordingly, those that are written less frequently (for example, cancers of the reproductive organs in men) are less common.

It’s a paradox, but those people who consume more news usually have the most distorted vision of the world. This can lead to the fact that they risk their health, underestimating for themselves the risk of a particular disease.

And that's not all. Public perceptions of the dangers of a particular type of oncology can lead to the fact that research on more dangerous cancer will not receive the necessary funding from the government (which is also guided by the mood in society and in the media).

And finally, there is more and more evidence that the news can penetrate our dreams.

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They say that many people, forced to spend time at home in self-isolation, began to see unusually lively and sometimes frightening dreams.

One explanation is the result of the work of our imagination, which is looking for a way out of the lockdown situation. Another is that we are simply better able to remember our dreams now because we often wake up in the middle of REM sleep, during which we dream.

But there is another possible reason: this is due to the way the pandemic is portrayed in the news.

Recall that after the attacks on the United States on September 11, people also saw terrible dreams. And the connection between such dreams and how often a person watched television news was clearly established.

“This was not the case with radio or talking about the incident with friends and family,” said Ruth Propper, a psychologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey who led the study. “I believe that the television footage of the deaths is to blame for this - they caused psychological trauma.”

The news is darker than real life

And in fact, to paraphrase the science fiction Robert Heinlein, we can say that to wallow in the suffering of seven billion strangers is not very useful for your psyche.

After months of continuous bombardment with headlines about Covid-19, signs of an impending coronavirus anxiety crisis appeared.

Charitable organizations around the world that help people with mental problems report an unprecedented level of demand for their services. Many people just give up social networks for a while to protect themselves from the flow of news.

And although the new reality that we got into with the pandemic is partly responsible for this stress, psychologists have long noticed: the news itself adds an additional dose of poison.

This is proved by studying the consequences of many crises: the more news a person consumes, the higher the likelihood that he will develop symptoms of stress, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The way the news affects our psyche is partly a psychological mystery, because in most cases it does not directly affect us.

And when they influence (as studies of cases like the explosions at the Boston marathon have shown), coverage of events can be more harmful to our psyche than reality itself.

This can be explained through something called emotional forecasting - trying to predict our future feelings about something.

According to Rebecca Thompson, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, most of us are fairly confident in our ability to predict how we will feel. “For example, if you were asked to imagine how you would feel tomorrow when you found out you won the lottery, you would probably think you would be in a great mood,” she says.

But when you start talking to people after an important event in their life has happened, it turns out that it had a much weaker effect on their emotions than they expected.

A 1978 classic study compared the level of satisfaction with the lives of those whose lives had recently changed dramatically due to winning a large sum in the lottery and those who had an accident and were paralyzed. Lottery lucky were only slightly happier than the victims of the accident.

In short, we have a poor idea of ​​ourselves and our emotions in the future, as a rule, making mistakes in forecasts.

Roughly the same thing happens in crisis days. As Thompson explains, at the moment, many people are probably fixated on future troubles. And this mistake leads to unhealthy behavior.

“If you are really worried about a real threat to your life, you will inevitably try to learn as much as possible about it so that you understand where things are going,” Thompson notes. And this leads us into the trap of news overload.

Those who believe that events will have a negative impact on their psyche and overall health tend to suffer as a result, and, according to Thompson, the amount of stressful information that overwhelms the person is largely responsible for this.

She points out that much of the coverage is sensationalist, with reporters being blown away or knee-deep in water in a hurricane, with the emphasis on the worst-case scenario.

In fact, such reporting pushes us to take a catastrophic view not only of a specific event, but also of everything else in our lives - from finances to romantic relationships.

In a 2012 study, it turned out that women (but, strangely, not men) who underwent a stream of negative news experienced more stress in other life situations, which led to jumps in the level of cortisol, stress hormone, in their body.

“Men typically already have fairly high cortisol levels, so it’s possible that they simply don’t have room to increase it,” said Marie-France Marin, a psychologist at the University of Quebec (Montreal) and author of the study.

However, women have a better memory for everything negative, so apparently, it really affects them more strongly.

Bad news has the ability to speed up the heartbeat, and there are alarming signs that this can have serious long-term effects on human health.

When Holman and colleagues studied the psychological consequences of 9/11, it turned out that those who reported heart palpitations in those days were 53% more likely to experience cardiovascular problems in the next three years, even if we take into account their previous health status.

In one of the more recent studies, scientists tried to figure out whether the news alone could be the fault of this, and found that four or more hours of news a day about what happened on September 11, 2001, were likely to guarantee health problems in subsequent years.

“What’s particularly remarkable about that study is that the majority received information about terrorist attacks exclusively from the media,” Holman emphasizes. “And yet it had such a long-lasting effect on their health.” I suspect there is something else that played a role in this, but we haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

But why are events that happen to us unfamiliar to us, sometimes thousands of kilometers away from us, so strongly affect us?

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Holman has several assumptions, and one of them is this: the vivid picture of television news is to blame.

And sometimes the TV can work in the background - for example, in the gym. Holman recalls that the entire time the reporter was reporting on the incident, the same footage was broadcast over and over again.

“This vicious cycle of images gets into your brain, it repeats, repeats, repeats. At the same time, we are not watching a horror film whose plot is made up, we are being shown real life! And I suspect that this kind of looping repetition is why news affects us so much,” says Holman.

Holman emphasizes that news coverage has never been just news reports, one after another. This is a kind of entertainment to which the media resort to competing with each other in the struggle for our precious time.

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