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How the News Media Traumatize Us
News is easier to consume than ever before. It is beautifully curated in our smartphone apps, social media accounts, and television channels, and it is continuously optimized to make it increasingly irresistible. The more terrifying, enraging, and shocking the headline, the more likely we are to click and read more.
The advantages of up-to-date information about global events are obvious. When we know what’s going on at home and around the world, we’re better informed in our travel plans, living plans, and our political decision-making. But the ease of access to information also comes with a curse. Sometimes, information is actively harmful for our wellbeing, and I don’t just mean biased information or fake content. Even factual descriptions of an event can adjust our psychology in dysfunctional directions that reduce the quality of our decision-making.
In new work published in February 2019, a group of European researchers compared the psychological effects of threats experienced directly, to threats that we learn about second-hand. They designed a simple experiment in which participants saw either a blue or a yellow block on a computer screen, one of which was accompanied by a painful electric shock. However, participants learned about the electric shock in one of three different ways depending on their randomly assigned group. Group 1 received the shock…
