Patrick McKendry

April has been yet another tough month for media companies as layoffs and program shutdowns rolled through the industry. Buzzfeed announced that it would be unable to sustain the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buzzfeed News.¹ Vice Media Group similarly announced it would cancel the Vice News Tonight broadcast as the news organization was restructured and streamlined into the broader company.² Even the content behemoth Disney has not been immune to the pressures with another round of layoffs hitting ABC News and niche data-driven journalism brand FiveThirtyEight.³ The usual suspects are at play in the cuts - Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti acknowledged that his over-investment in BuzzFeed News in years prior left the group exposed as the economy soured.¹

Still, for these and other digitally distributed news outlets the recent economic slowdown is simply the sign-off on a headline story that was moving towards its conclusion years ago. Per Courtney Radsch of UCLA Law, “The news industry didn't really have a profit model other than trying to get eyeballs and earn digital advertising revenue…tech platforms, specifically Google and Facebook, ended up controlling that digital advertising infrastructure."⁴ Journalists were stuck competing for engagement on these platforms alongside everyone else in order to keep their readership high. Fast-forward to today and we can see why this was a losing business strategy. But beyond bad strategy, this push for engagement also had a darker impact.

As far back as 1890, journalists have known the quip “if it bleeds, it leads”. The strategy was popularized by William Randolph Hearst as he realized that sensational and gruesome stories about the Spanish-American War sold more newspapers.⁵ A March 2023 study published in Nature gives us the modern reading of this phrase - “negativity drives online news consumption”.⁶ Now, let’s all say in unison “Yes, we already know that!” However, this analysis was impressive for its scope. The study looked at a dataset from Upworthy.com of 370 million article impressions to generate a set of more than 20,000 randomized controlled trials. The researchers found that each additional negative word increased article click-thru-rate by 2.3%. Broadly speaking, this negativity-friendly reward system contributed to a more hostile online environment as people predictably clicked into polarizing articles and were resultantly enraged by opposing viewpoints they saw there.

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There’s Nothing Better Than Bad

Our brain loves bad things. Evolutionary psychologists explain modern psychological phenomena based on the recurring pressures our ancestors faced millions of years ago.⁷ Using these forces we can anecdotally describe our fixation with the negative like so - “If you miss out on an opportunity to forage for some delicious berries, you will be sad…but if you accidentally eat a poison mushroom, you will be dead.”⁸ As a result of these unbalanced rewards, our brains tend to focus on and more deeply encode memories of bad outcomes.

Unfortunately, that causal explanation is not a testable hypothesis. But we can see and measure this focus on bad things - known as negativity bias - in all types of common modern occurrences. Bad parents have more impact than good parents, bad information is processed more thoroughly than good information, and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and harder to unravel.⁹ Further, our focus on the negative is not a learned behavior we pick up through our experiences. Instead, it seems to be an inherent part of our being as infants show increased neural activity to monitor and mirror negative emotions in their parents more than they do positive ones.¹⁰

Because of the way negative stimuli captures our attention, it also has influence in our professional lives. Our jobs are inherently full of potential for problematic outcomes - we compete daily against our market competition, receive critical feedback to help us grow, work with other teams who have separate or contradictory goals, balance work and life responsibilities, and align our individual ambitions with our manager’s expectations for us. When these things do not fall in our favor, we notice immediately and we do not easily forget. So, usually we complain.

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Negativity Breeds Negativity

Complaining is useful. It gives us the chance to get something off our chest and talking about it seems to release the pressure valve of irritation before it blows. Further, it creates the potential for us to find community with others who might have similar frustrations and concerns. However, we need to be careful because what starts as a simple complaint can grow to a fixation. Three cognitive biases come together to create this effect:¹²

Negativity Bias - We covered this earlier but our brain tends to fixate on the negative. This makes it easy for us to identify things to complain about.
Availability Bias - We tend to overestimate how common or important things are if they easily come to mind. Said differently, the more easily we can bring something to mind the greater we perceive their impacts to be. Complaining about problems brings them top-of-mind, which triggers the availability bias and makes us believe that the problems that we see must be happening all of the time and must be impactful.
Confirmation Bias - We tend to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs. After complaining enough about a problem, we will begin to seek out things that highlight that our complaints are valid and ignore things that suggest otherwise.

These biases can combine to turn a small moment of irritation into a full-blow crisis.

For example, imagine that in a team performance meeting your manager asks you a question that directly challenges the conclusion you put together. Negativity bias will make sure that the question does not simply roll past as you fixate on the criticism. Availability bias will make sure that you overestimate how much that question mattered. While everyone else on the team did not notice and certainly does not remember the moment, you are sure of its impact to your reputation within the team and that your manager is probably always thinking about your shortcomings. Finally, with confirmation bias you start to notice all of the moments where your manager seems to doubt your abilities and ignore moments of positive feedback and support they provide for you. As a result, a simple question that was intended to help you grow in your role has completely sabotaged your relationship with your manager.

Or, imagine that you did not receive a promotion during the latest company review cycle even though you thought that you had earned it. That will certainly sting and bring the negativity bias into full effect as the perceived slight will sit endlessly in the back of your mind. Next, the availability bias will kick in as you start to over-emphasize the impacts of the missed promotion. Maybe you start to extrapolate that people do not think highly of you or the various strategic proposals you offered, when in reality it was those proposals that had you in the conversation for a promotion in the first place. Maybe you start to wonder if your manager does not trust you and chose to not expand your scope as a result. Maybe this decision is a sign that you were never doing well in the first place and the company is trying to push you out of the organization. Finally, confirmation bias kicks in to find evidence to support your swirling hypotheses. Perhaps your manager loops you in late to a new due diligence project because it had a low probability of getting off the ground and they did not want to waste your time. But, you see the invite as evidence that they did not want your opinion at the start for whether or not the project made sense to pursue. Or perhaps a team lead assigns a new project to someone else in the group because they already know you are able to deliver it and would not grow from working on the project. But, you see the assignment as confirmation that your team lead has lost trust in your ability to deliver work.

This swirl is not harmless. Stress disorders are not driven exclusively by individual traumatic events. The cumulative effects of chronic stress can be just as significant.¹³ And the impacts of stress on health and well-being are well understood, contributing to higher risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and more.¹⁴ Negativity can also be contagious and influence those around you. Perhaps you have experienced this when you had a conversation with a co-worker who complained about an objectively valid problem they were having with a manager only to walk away feeling angry and uninspired yourself. Sufficiently high rates of indirect exposure of stress can create stress in us. For dramatic example, a 2014 study measuring the traumatic effects from the Boston Marathon bombings found higher levels of acute stress in Americans across the country due to repeated media exposure than from the acute stress levels from direct exposure of being in the city of Boston during the event.¹⁵

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Upset, But Not Unbalanced

The conclusion is not that we should not complain. I find that verbalizing annoyances and concerns helps people to process them and takes away a lot of their power. In my experience, the key is to discuss complaints mindfully. When focusing on the negative we have to be aware of its outsized influence on our mental state and approach it accordingly, just like we would with any other bias. When I field complaints from others or myself, I try to follow three steps:

Listen & Affirm - It feels good to be heard. It creates understanding and is nice to know that our concerns are warranted. It is also productive to be heard. When we feel listened to, we are more likely to approach problems with a more open mind and be receptive to feedback and recommendations. Further, keep in mind that if you want to maintain open communication, this step is important because people will go somewhere else if they think they are more likely to find a willing listener.
Highlight Blindspots - This step is about short-circuiting availability and confirmation bias. Check if there could be other potential explanations behind the outcomes we are seeing? If we try and look at a situation from the other person’s perspective and assume good intent, what might they be considering? Can you collaboratively brainstorm examples that contradict the complaint rather than confirm it?
Find a Next Step - Swirl happens when flow is stopped. Without a path or planned next step, our mind will continue to fixate on the negative situation we are in. Defining an action gives us something to go and do, which empowers us and turns the negative into something positive at the end. Note that this does not need to be an all-encompassing solution. It just needs to be a step forward, something to go and try.

Biases are powerful and an all-too-human fact of life. However, we can take back control with proper focus, structure, and action.

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Conclusion

If we were lucky, media organizations might reflect on their tough recent run and decide that overblown mania in articles and headlines might drive immediate revenue lift but that it does not equate to a stable underlying operating model. Yet, as we look over time it is more likely that we will see the skew towards negative headlines for decades to come. For ourselves, we can do some reflection too. Our own bias of focusing on the bad outcomes in our work is likely something we will never fully put aside. But, we can decide to approach these issues with greater intention and establish an operating model that keeps us positive, productive, and progressing.

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References

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News Closures & Why Everything Seems to Suck