Big ideas.
Once a week.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
Why We Love Bad News: Understanding Negativity Bias
90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because that’s what we pay attention to.

Every second of every day our brain is bombarded by way too much data than we can possibly process and because nothing is more important to our survival to the species than survival all our visual data, auditory data is funneled to a sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala.
The amygdala is our danger detector. It’s our early warning system. It literally combs through all of the sensory input looking for any kind of a danger on putting in on high alert and it evolved during an era of human evolution that was of the immediate type, the tiger in the bush. You would hear a rustle in the leaves and you would think tiger, not wind and the point—one percent of the time that it was a tiger it saved your life, but today the amygdala literally calls our attention to all the negative stories and if you see a thousand stories you’re going to focus on the negative ones and the media takes advantage of this and you know the old saw if it bleeds it leads. Well that’s why 90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because that’s what we pay attention to.
And as it turns out we also have a number of what are called cognitive biases. The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman first addressed these and these cognitive biases keep us negative. We have a negativity bias, which is the tendency to give far more information to negative details than positive ones and the confirmation bias, which is our tendency to selectively look at information or see information that confirms our preexisting notions, which is fine except that our preexisting notions are typically negative and therefore, we’re reconfirming our negative expectations.
So ultimately we are kept in this negative state of mind and when the amygdala goes on high alert because much of the dangers around us today are probabilistic dangers, a pandemic might strike, an asteroid might hit, we end up in a situation that our amygdala is always on high alert and it’s screening out the positive news and allowing in the negative news.
In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
What early US presidents looked like, according to AI-generated images
"Deepfakes" and "cheap fakes" are becoming strikingly convincing — even ones generated on freely available apps.
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington
- A writer named Magdalene Visaggio recently used FaceApp and Airbrush to generate convincing portraits of early U.S. presidents.
- "Deepfake" technology has improved drastically in recent years, and some countries are already experiencing how it can weaponized for political purposes.
- It's currently unknown whether it'll be possible to develop technology that can quickly and accurately determine whether a given video is real or fake.
The future of deepfakes
<p>In 2018, Gabon's president Ali Bongo had been out of the country for months receiving medical treatment. After Bongo hadn't been seen in public for months, rumors began swirling about his condition. Some suggested Bongo might even be dead. In response, Bongo's administration released a video that seemed to show the president addressing the nation.</p><p>But the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=324528215059254" target="_blank">video</a> is strange, appearing choppy and blurry in parts. After political opponents declared the video to be a deepfake, Gabon's military attempted an unsuccessful coup. What's striking about the story is that, to this day, experts in the field of deepfakes can't conclusively verify whether the video was real. </p><p>The uncertainty and confusion generated by deepfakes poses a "global problem," according to a <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-seeing-still-believing-the-deepfake-challenge-to-truth-in-politics/#cancel" target="_blank">2020 report from The Brookings Institution</a>. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense released some of the first tools able to successfully detect deepfake videos. The problem, however, is that deepfake technology keeps improving, meaning forensic approaches may forever be one step behind the most sophisticated forms of deepfakes. </p><p>As the 2020 report noted, even if the private sector or governments create technology to identify deepfakes, they will:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"...operate more slowly than the generation of these fakes, allowing false representations to dominate the media landscape for days or even weeks. "A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on," warns David Doermann, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Buffalo. And if defensive methods yield results short of certainty, as many will, technology companies will be hesitant to label the likely misrepresentations as fakes."</p>The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a number of new behaviours into daily routines, like physical distancing, mask-wearing and hand sanitizing. Meanwhile, many old behaviours such as attending events, eating out and seeing friends have been put on hold.
VR experiments manipulate how people feel about coffee
A new study looks at how images of coffee's origins affect the perception of its premiumness and quality.
Expert drinking coffee while wearing a VR headset.
- Images can affect how people perceive the quality of a product.
- In a new study, researchers show using virtual reality that images of farms positively influence the subjects' experience of coffee.
- The results provide insights on the psychology and power of marketing.
Is empathy always good?
Research has shown how important empathy is to relationships, but there are limits to its power.
