The latest research suggests that the news can shape us in surprising ways – from our perception of risk to the content of our dreams, to our chances of having a heart attack.
Alison Holman was working on a fairly ordinary study of mental health across the United States. Then tragedy struck.
On 15 April 2013, as hundreds of runners streaked past the finish line at the annual Boston Marathon, two bombs exploded, ten seconds apart. Three people were killed that day, including an eight-year-old boy. Hundreds were injured. Sixteen people lost limbs.
As the world mourned the tragedy, news organisations embarked upon months – years, if you count the trial – of graphic coverage. Footage of the moment of detonation, and the ensuing confusion and smoke, were broadcast repeatedly. Newspapers were strewn with haunting images: blood-spattered streets, grieving spectators and visibly shaken victims whose clothing had been torn from their bodies.
And so it happened that Holman and colleagues from the University of California, Irvine, found themselves in the midst of a national crisis, sitting on data about the mental wellbeing of nearly 5,000 people just before it happened. They decided to find out if that had changed in the weeks afterwards.
It’s intuitively obvious that being physically present for – or personally affected by – a terrorist incident is likely to be bad for your mental health. By chance, there were some people in the study who had first-hand experience of the bombings, and it was indeed true that their mental health suffered. But there was also a twist.
Another group had been even more badly shaken: those who had not seen the explosion in person, but had consumed six or more hours of news coverage per day in the week afterwards. Bizarrely, knowing someone who had been injured or died, or having been in the vicinity as the bombs went off, were not as predictive of high acute stress.
“It was a big ‘aha’ moment for us,” says Holman. “I think people really strongly, deeply underestimate the impact the news can have.”
It turns out that news coverage is far more than a benign source of facts. From our attitudes to immigrants to the content of our dreams, it can sneak into our subconscious and meddle with our lives in surprising ways. It can lead us to miscalculate certain risks, shape our views of foreign countries, and possibly influence the health of entire economies. It can increase our risk of developing post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression. Now there’s emerging evidence that the emotional fallout of news coverage can even affect our physical health – increasing our chances of having a heart attack or developing health problems years later.
Ever since the first hints of a mysterious new virus began to emerge from China last year, televised news has seen record viewing figures, as millions diligently tune in for daily government briefings and updates on the latest fatalities, lockdown rules and material for their own armchair analysis.
But in 2020 these sources aren’t the only, or even the main, way that we keep up to date with current affairs. When you factor in podcasts, streaming services, radio, social media and websites – which often want to send us notifications throughout the day – as well as links shared by friends, it becomes clear that we are constantly simmering in a soup of news, from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we close our eyes each night.
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Surprisingly few studies have looked into how this all adds up, but in 2018 – well before we were confined to our homes with a major global crisis unravelling around us – the average American spent around eleven hours every day looking at screens, where information about global events is hard to escape. Many of us even take our primary news-delivery devices, our mobile phones, to bed.
Hardwired affects
One potential reason the news affects us so much is the so-called “negativity bias”, a well-known psychological quirk which means we pay more attention to all the worst things happening around us.
It’s thought to have evolved to protect us from danger and helps to explain why a person’s flaws are often more noticeable than their assets, why losses weigh on us more heavily than gains, and why fear is more motivating than opportunity. Governments even build it into their policies – torn between providing a positive or negative incentive for the general public, the latter is much more likely to work.
The news is accidentally warping our perception of reality – and not necessarily for the better.
