Why bad news travels fast

In March I deleted every news app from my phone. I'd got into the habit of checking headlines forty times a day: on the bus, in the lift, in bed. My partner said I'd started reading bad news out loud at breakfast. I wasn't any better informed. I was just anxious all the time, and I wanted to know why the news had such a hold on me.

Psychologists have a name for part of it: negativity bias. For most of human history, people who paid close attention to danger were more likely to survive. A noise in the long grass might be the wind, or it might be a snake, and it was safer to assume the worst. That instinct is still with us. One bad piece of news stays in the mind far longer than several good ones.

News organisations know this. One large study of online headlines found that each extra negative word made readers slightly more likely to click. TV works the same way, since a fire makes better pictures than a small improvement in school results. The result is a picture of the world that's darker than the reality. In surveys, people often say crime is rising in years when it's actually falling.

I'm not the only one who took a break. Researchers call it news avoidance, and it's growing in many countries. Some of my friends stopped following the news years ago and say they've never been happier. The worry is that people who tune out completely become easier to fool, because they miss the background to a story. Frightened people also tend to grab simple answers, which is exactly what misleading claims offer.

After my month off, I came back, but differently. I read one paper in the morning, not forty headlines. I check where a story comes from before I share it. I've also started reading solutions journalism, which reports on problems but also on who is trying to fix them and whether it's working. Early research suggests readers find these stories more engaging. I finish them feeling a lot less helpless.