Cross-National Evidence of a Negativity Bias in Psychophysiological Reactions to News

Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news

Stuart Sorokaa,b,1,2, Patrick Fournierc,1, and Lilach Nird,e

aDepartment of Communication and Media, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; bDepartment of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; cDepartement´ de Science Politique, Universite´ de Montreal,´ Montreal,´ QC H3C 3J7, Canada; dDepartment of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel; and eDepartment of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel

Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved August 5, 2019 (received for review May 14, 2019)

What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One highlights the possibility that news content could be attention- answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly grabbing for some citizens even if it is not systematically to negative than positive information. “Negativity biases” in negative. human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stim- Background uli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This Our research is motivated by 2 widely recognized features work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent of modern-day communications. First, mass-mediated news is experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to a central and critical component of large-scale representative real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive democracy. Media provide a critical flow of information between cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but elites and citizens and are a vital mechanism for democratic they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level varia- accountability. Second, negative tone is a defining feature of tion in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results news; good news, in contrast, is nearly synonymous with the make clear the pervasiveness of negativity biases on average, absence of news. This asymmetry in coverage has been the they help account for the tendency for audience-seeking news focus of a considerable body of work on mass media in around the world to be predominantly negative. Insofar as our the United States (1, 2), and it is evident in studies of media results highlight individual-level variation, however, they high- content and journalists’ decisions cross-nationally (3–5). Impor- light the potential for more positive content, and suggest that tantly, this work suggests that, even as news coverage has been there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic negative for many years, it has also been increasing in recent wisdom that “if it bleeds, it leads.” decades. In sum, the nature and quality of mass-mediated news content is central to the nature and quality of representative democ- news coverage | negativity bias | political communication racy, and that content is systematically skewed toward negative information. This is partly a function of the demand for neg- his paper is focused on the human propensity to give more ative news, since market forces will produce news in line with Tweight to negative information than to positive information and the relevance of this tendency for the nature of news cov- Significance erage. The importance of negativity biases for news is relatively clear. Negativity biases affect news selection, and thus also news News coverage of current affairs is predominantly negative. production, as well as citizens’ attitudes about current affairs. American accounts of this tendency tend to focus on journalis- Testing for the prevalence of negativity biases and considering tic practices, but this cannot easily account for negative news their implications for the nature of news content is central to our content around the world. It is more likely that negativity in understanding of the flow and impact of mass-mediated current- news is a product of a human tendency to be more atten- affairs content. In a period during which news around the world tive to negative news content. Just how widespread is this is especially wrought with negativity, this subject is of obvious tendency? Our evidence suggest that, all around the world, significance. the average human is more physiologically activated by neg- The paper proceeds as follows. We first review the existing ative than by positive news stories. Even so, there is a great literature on negativity biases, particularly as it relates to news deal of variation across individuals. The latter finding is of real consumption, highlighting the paucity of comparative research significance for newsmakers: Especially in a diversified media on the issue. We note that one major consequence of this gap in environment, news producers should not underestimate the research is an inability to distinguish the extent to which these audience for positive news content. negativity biases vary due not just to individual-level, but also to cultural, political, or media-system factors. The key, we argue, Author contributions: S.S., P.F., and L.N. designed research; S.S., P.F., and L.N. performed lies in testing for differences in responses to news content across research; S.S. and P.F. analyzed data; and S.S. and P.F. wrote the paper.y both individuals and cultures. We then present results from what The authors declare no conflict of interest.y is, to our knowledge, the single largest, directly comparable body This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.y of data on negativity biases in psychophysiological responses to This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- video news. NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).y Results, based on over 1,000 respondents across 17 coun- Data deposition: The data and an R script that replicates all analyses have been tries and 6 continents, suggest that there is, on average, a deposited at the Harvard Dataverse, under the lead author’s data page (https://dataverse. negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to video news harvard.edu/dataverse/ssoroka).y content. There are, however, also considerable differences in 1S.S. and P.F. contributed equally to this work.y the way in which individuals react to negative versus positive 2 To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: [email protected] news content. These individual-level differences are not easily This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10. explained by culture or country. Indeed, there is considerable 1073/pnas.1908369116/-/DCSupplemental.y within-country variation in responses to news content. This fact Published online September 3, 2019.

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SOCIAL SCIENCES Analyses use data at several different levels of aggregation. 0.2 Variation in heart rate was necessarily measured over longer intervals—in this case, over the course of entire news stories. Analysis of RMSSD values is thus at the respondent–story level. Skin conductance can be measured over very short time peri- 0.0 ods; here, we examined nSCL using a time-series panel dataset in which each respondent was a “panel” and nSCL was cap- tured at 1-s intervals. The processing of physiological measures is discussed in SI Appendix. −0.2 The basic results for RMSSD, estimated across all participants in all countries, are illustrated in Fig. 1. Results are based on the regression model shown in SI Appendix, Table S2.(SI Appendix, Table S3 reproduces the same model, assigning weights to indi- Change in nSCL (*100) −0.4 viduals so that all country-level samples are weighted equally; results are not substantively different.) The shift shown in Fig. 1, from an average story tone of 2 (positive) to +2 (negative), is − −0.6 equivalent to 10% of the observed SD in RMSSD. Participants thus exhibited higher variability in heart rate during negative news stories than they did during positive news stories. Given Positive Neutral Negative past work on HRV and media content (44), we interpret these results as reflecting higher attentiveness and arousal during these Video Tone negative stories. Results for nSCL are illustrated in Fig. 2, based on second-by- Fig. 2. The estimated effect of by-second news story tone on nSCL, 20 s into second models shown in SI Appendix, Table S4. Note that these news stories, all countries combined. results are similar to those using the same respondent-stimulus- level data as was used for RMSSD; these models are included in SI Appendix, Table S2 (without country weights) and SI Appendix, Anglo-American respondents. The fact that a negativity bias in Table S3 (with country weights). The second-by-second models physiological responses to video news is readily evident in cross- of nSCL interacted negativity with time (in seconds, by story), national data using stimuli with high external validity is of real given past work suggesting that the impact of negativity on skin significance. To be clear: This study directly demonstrates that conductance decreases over the course of a news story (42). Fig. 2 humans around the world are more activated by negative news shows the estimated impact of negative (+2) content, versus neu- coverage. We are, perhaps, one step closer to accounting for the tral (0) and positive (−2) content, 20 s into a news story. The high frequency of negative news content around the world. shift shown in Fig. 2 is equivalent to 65% of the observed SD in Recall, however, that our principal goal is to examine the nSCL. The evidence supports the expectation that physiological possibility of systematic cross-national variation. Figs. 3 and 4 arousal is greater for negative news coverage than for positive offer the critical diagnostic test. Fig. 3 shows the estimated effect news coverage. on RMSSD of a 1-unit increase in negativity, based on models Note that while these findings are in line with past work, they estimated separately for every participant, using the same spec- are among the first to rely on such a large sample, focused ification as in SI Appendix, Table S2. The distribution of these on actual video news content, and not based exclusively on estimated effects is shown, by country, where “estimated effects” are the coefficients for the negativity measure. The figure makes clear the high degree of variability underlying the overall result in 124 Fig. 1. On balance, there are more participants to the right of the zero line—suggesting that respondents are more attentive to and activated by negative news stories. Overall, the mean coefficient 122 is greater than zero. But there is a great deal of within-country variability as well. Indeed, Fig. 3 shows asterisks beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test); only Brazil, Canada, France, 120 Italy, and Sweden showed systematically higher RMSSD during negative video content. The story is relatively similar for nSCL, in Fig. 4, which plots 118 the estimated effect of a 1-unit increase in negativity on nSCL, RMSSD based on second-by-second models estimated separately for each participant, using the same specification as in SI Appendix, 116 Table S4. Again, results are shown by country, and asterisks are shown beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test). Results 114 point to significant negativity biases in 9 of the 17 countries. In 2 countries, New Zealand and Sweden, the impact of negativity is, on average, opposite to our expectations, although not significantly so. (And note that while country-by-country results vary Positive Neutral Negative slightly across different model specifications and levels of data aggregation, in all cases, the basic story is the same: an overall Video Tone average negativity bias, but with a good degree of individual-level difference; SI Appendix.) Fig. 1. The estimated effect of news story tone on RMSSD, all countries Country accounts for very little of the variation in Figs. 3 and combined. 4. ANOVAs suggest that country (included as a factor variable,

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SOCIAL SCIENCES substance and nature of news content, individual-level variability Vin Arceneaux, Chris Dawes, Johanna Dunaway, John Hibbing, Peter in negativity biases highlights the possibility for the audience- John Loewen, and Daniel Rubenson. We thank research coordinators and research assistants at our own and other institutions: Saja Abu-Fani, seeking success of news coverage that is less systematically Maxim Alyukov, Jeremy Adrian, Thiago Barbosa, Alexandre Blanchet, Danin negative. Chen, Yolanda Clatworthy, Lou d’Angelo, Danlin Chen, Veronica Dazzan, Fatou Diop, Thomas Donovan, Marie Fly, Nicole Gileadi, Amanda Materials and Methods Hampton, Matthias Heilke, Emma Heffernan, John Jensenius, Gonoi Ken, Saga Khaghani, Robert Lee Vidigal, Ling Liu, Sofie Lovbjerg, Eleonora There are 6 sections included in SI Appendix. SI Appendix, section A Marchetti, Radhika Mitra, Alex Nevitte, Hiroki Ogawa, Vijeta Pamnani, describes the experimental protocol. SI Appendix, section B includes the Shang Pan, Amma Panin, Shang Pan, Andres Parado, Heidi Payter, script used to introduce participants to the experiment. This study was Martina Perversi, Felipe Torres Raposo, Tea Rosic, Autumn Szczepanski, reviewed and approved by the Comite´ d’Ethique´ de la Recherche des Arts Alassane Sow, Dominic Valentino, Omer Yair, and Kirill Zhirkov. We have et des Sciences at the Universite´ de Montreal.´ Written informed consent relied on colleagues to help facilitate experiments abroad and owe spe- was sought from and provided by all participants, using text included in cial thanks to Michael Bang Petersen, Sharon Barnhardt, Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Fatou Binetou Dial, Ray Duch, Vladimir Gelman, Peiran Jiao, Masaru SI Appendix, section C. SI Appendix, section D discusses both sampling and Kohno, Neils Markwat, Johan Martinsson, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Elin location in each country. SI Appendix, section E describes the processing of Naurin, Nicholas Sauger, Sergio Splendore, Nurit Tal-Or, Yariv Tsfati, Mathieu physiological data. SI Appendix, section F briefly reviews alternative esti- Turgeon, and Jack Vowles. Experiments were run by using purpose-built mation strategies. For the purposes of education and research, data and software by Bennett Smith, first designed for work with Stephen McAdams replication materials are available through the Harvard Dataverse (48). and Elisabeth Gidengil; and preliminary work depended on laboratory space and funding from the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank conference participants and colleagues from the Hebrew University Halbert Center. This work was supported by the for remarks, some of which were fundamental to the study; in particular, Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.

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