Why we need information hygiene too [original research]
More people are turning to the media to reduce uncertainty. But new research suggests this could be doing us more harm than good.
Our study of the world’s largest database of online news media has revealed a huge spike in the use of highly emotive words in headlines over the last five months. Words such as ‘panic’ and ‘death’ have become endemic, and there’s strong evidence that this will had a marked impact on anxiety levels during one of the most mentally challenging periods in recent history.
The research looked at selected terms from a list of the top 1.4% (the top 200) most emotive words in the English language. These are words that are among the most difficult to ignore and have been proven to trigger strong, negative emotions. The list came from an experiment conducted in the US in 2013, in which researchers measured the impact of almost 14,000 words on 1,827 volunteers.
My colleagues and I looked at how the use of these words in news headlines has changed since 2015. Our source material was the world’s most comprehensive database of online news websites: the NOW (News on the Web) Corpus, which contains around 300,000 articles and more than 10 billion words.
Trigger word use rises five-fold
What we discovered was that the use of some of these highly triggering words has seen a huge leap compared with previous years – in some cases by as much as 500%. We detected spikes that extended way beyond the use of words such as ‘epidemic’ or ‘disease’, which you’d expect to increase with the rise in news stories covering the facts of a global pandemic. There has also been a sharp rise in the use of more generic terms such as ‘disaster’, ‘panic’ and ‘plague’. This is significant because these terms increase the emotional impact of the news headlines while arguably adding nothing to the factual content.
Some headlines provide a masterclass in how to wring maximum anxiety even out of positive news. For example, the website of the British newspaper the Daily Mirrorannounced an improvement in the Covid-19 figures with the headline ‘UK’s tragic coronavirus death toll rises by lowest number in seven weeks’.
The Daily Mirror announced an improvementin the Covid-19 figures with the headline ‘UK’s tragic coronavirus death toll rises by lowest number in seven weeks.
Note how the first half of that sentence appears to be announcing bad news, before changing direction (a phenomenon known in cognitive neuroscience as ‘garden pathing’). This is particularly pernicious, as we tend to scan headlines and often don’t read to the end.
This matters because we turn to the media partly to seek information and reduce uncertainty, which is one of the biggest causes of anxiety in humans. Most of us have never experienced more uncertainty than we are experiencing now. So we use the media more than ever in an attempt to make sense of the extraordinary times in which we find ourselves (and, by extension, to reduce anxiety). For example, an extra 31 million people visited the website of The Washington Post in the third week of March compared with the previous week – a rise in traffic of more than 60 per cent (from 51 million to 82 million visits).
Increasing anxiety
But in doing so, it seems likely that, far from reducing anxiety, we are actually increasing it. That anxiety will have a widespread effect on our lives, affecting even actions and decisions that have nothing to do with Covid-19 or its immediate impact. The resulting tension will also affect our relationships and make it far more difficult to meet the challenges we currently face.
Written communication is what psychologists call a low-capacity channel, meaning that there’s a low limit to how much information it can carry and still be effective. Neuroscience shows that reading requires more cognitive power than we may realise. Our brains lack structures dedicated to the task, as we evolved to speak and listen, not to read and write. This leaves little cognitive energy spare for emotional control (which is partly why we’re surprisingly prone to getting angry when reading email and text messages.).
Headlines go straight to the emotional centre of the brain
So those headlines are going straight to the amygdala, which is the emotional centre of the brain. Extensive research also shows we have an inbuilt bias towards negative information. As a result, it takes four pieces of good news to counteract one piece of bad news. It’s because of this bias that most news sites focus on bad news: the standard advice in journalism is: ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.
The only way around this problem is to limit news consumption. No matter how tempting it may be to flip to your favourite news website to check what’s going on in the world, you’d be wise to proceed with caution.
We’re all feeling uncertain at the moment. But turning to the news every five minutes in an attempt to reduce that uncertainty will only make things far worse.
Words matter, and written words matter most of all.
Sources
Warriner, Amy Beth; Kuperman, Victor and Brysbaert, March. Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behav Res (2013) 45:1191–1207.
Similarweb Search on web traffic for New York Times, Washington Post, Fox Newsand USA Today. Accessed 2 June 2020.
Additional research by Louis Ashton
