In the age of the internet and the “global village,” an irrational fear taking hold in a small American town can easily go viral, reaching and affecting us all. Once online, news—whether true or false—can have a corrosive effect, leading us to feel cynical about the future and to hold low expectations for our leaders.
The internet is a world of nonstop information, available largely for free. On nearly any topic, we can access a full spectrum of viewpoints—though some resonate more than others. In general, the most viral are the negative, alarmist, and extreme. This is how we come to believe things are worse than they really are and that the world is going downhill, even as statistics prove this is often far from the truth.
The number of people living in poverty has dropped by 20% in the last 40 years. The global infant mortality rate has fallen by 60% over the past 50 years. Average life expectancy worldwide has risen by 30% since the 1960s. The number of people per million who have died in armed conflicts decreased from 235 in 1950 to 2.5 in 2007, despite a rise in local conflicts. The percentage of people with access to sanitation has increased by 50% since the 1990s, and rates of new HIV/AIDS cases are declining globally, as is the incidence of cancer in some developed countries.
The list of improvements goes on, yet according to a public opinion survey conducted in 38 countries, these positive statistics don’t seem to register. Most people mistakenly believe that rates of violent crime and terrorist attacks are significantly higher than they actually are, or that teen pregnancy rates are much higher than reality (often with 40% difference between the perceived and real number of pregnancies). People also tend to overestimate the number of smartphone owners or Facebook users (even with 60% differences between perception and reality, in both cases). Why are our perceptions so persistently inaccurate and overwhelmingly negative? Experts explain that the cognitive biases we’ve developed as a society now work against us in the digital age.
The tendency to generalise
First described in 1973 by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the tendency to believe that the last piece of information we encounter represents a common reality is a prime culprit in today’s world of limitless information exposure. This tendency helps explain why people fear shark attacks more than drowning, despite the far greater risk of the latter, or why they dread terrorism more than aviation accidents, though the statistical risk of dying in a plane crash is higher. It also sheds light on why American parents are increasingly reluctant to let their children play outside unsupervised, despite this being one of the safest eras in history for children, says Christopher Mims for The Wall Street Journal.
The media has long capitalised on this bias since the birth of sensationalist journalism, but the internet amplifies it by making every terrorist attack, child abduction, jogger homicide, and assault seem as if it happened in our own backyard. In this “global village,” the notion that anything can happen to anyone has never felt more immediate or resonant.
The tendency to exaggerate
This tendency, as old as storytelling itself, underpins many of the enduring myths in history and is a hallmark of great narrators. A positive story is glorified, a negative one gains horrific elements, and so on. In today’s online landscape—more accurately described as the “attention economy,” where everyone competes to capture as many people’s attention for as long as possible—this tendency to exaggerate has itself become amplified.
“Our audiences are getting larger and larger, so the trend is to push things to extremes to capture their attention,” says Professor Jonah Berger, an expert in idea dissemination. “Things can no longer be simply engaging; they must be extremely engaging.”
Content that can evoke both strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously has the best chances of going viral. For instance, a story about a child’s kidnapping evokes both anger and a sense of moral superiority. By sharing it, people feel they are contributing to child safety everywhere. “It’s a potent mix of outrage and virtue,” says Lenore Skenazy, president of an NGO advocating for greater independence in children’s lives.
The tendency to always be right
This tendency to seek out information that confirms our preexisting views—while ignoring contrary evidence—is well-known and extensively studied. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Righteous Mind that our moral judgments often stem from gut reactions. We tend to first answer, then seek rational explanations to justify our answers. If your initial reaction to this article was, “No, things really are getting worse—I’ll find some stats to prove it,” then it’s worth recognising that response as part of the problem.
Social media algorithms, whether by design or not, amplify this tendency and tend to sort us into “information bubbles”—feeding us content that aligns with our interests and beliefs. Applied to over 2 billion people, this has led to an unprecedented polarisation of public opinion. This effect is further intensified by the fact that, despite the perception of a wide range of accessible information, we are often only exposed to a narrow selection. In such an environment, manipulation becomes remarkably easy.
The tendency to view the present negatively and idealise the past
Paseism, the tendency to idealise the past, is an age-old habit, bringing up memories painted with nostalgia for events long gone. We put on rose-coloured glasses, exaggerating the good aspects of the past while erasing the negative ones. Part of this process is natural. As we age, we tend to remember positive experiences over negative ones. A 2005 study found that older adults can manage emotions more effectively, in part because they retain a higher proportion of positive memories. The brain, says psychiatrist Dave Archer, has a bias for positive memories, even enhancing the good elements of these recollections while downplaying the bad.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that today might seem worse than yesterday. This perception aligns with two other tendencies: our natural inclination to focus more on negative events and potential dangers, and the belief that society or an institution is on a continuous downward path, regardless of statistics. Our brains process positive and negative information differently, with a heightened reaction to negative news, a key factor in why the media skews sensationalistic and pessimistic. Just consider the prevalence of headlines like “2017 Was the Worst Year, But Here Comes 2018” or “Just When You Thought Things Couldn’t Get Worse.” Little wonder that 63% of Americans worry about the country’s future, and 59% “consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember,” according to the American Psychological Association.
The cycle concludes with the fact that we require more evidence to believe things are improving, yet are satisfied with minimal proof to conclude that they’re getting worse. A study published in 2017 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology confirmed this tendency. On one hand, this mechanism is helpful, allowing us to act quickly when we detect a decline. On the other, in the digital age, it can lead to thought patterns resulting in risky decisions. For instance, uncertainty observed in some of the 38 countries studied about the non-existent link between vaccines and autism—thoroughly refuted by the medical community—can affect both individual and public health. Additionally, believing that most of our fellow citizens think and feel as we do can lead to unexpected events, which we struggle to comprehend or process constructively, such as the election of Donald Trump or Brexit.
Today, it seems that information itself has become the enemy of idealism. But if we could look just a bit further, perhaps by exploring the works of psychologist Steven Pinker—who illustrates how many of the negative factors clouding our thoughts and dimming our outlook have actually been declining for decades—we might gain a broader, more accurate perspective on our own lives. Neither Pinker nor others committed to this intellectual effort claim that major, urgent global problems have vanished or that new challenges aren’t emerging. Instead, we should make room for both truths: that we’ve come a long way, finding ourselves in a better place than before, and that there remains a long journey ahead, with more challenges to resolve.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that humanity is on an inevitable path to ultimate triumph over all its problems. Historically, human progress has often been accompanied by an increase in destructive capacities and by ever-larger issues affecting more people worldwide. Today’s environmental challenges—from plastic pollution to global warming—are prime examples. However, one of the major crises afflicting the modern world—chronic generalised anxiety and depression—can be eased, at least somewhat, through recognising and understanding our own thought patterns. This approach can help us understand why we think the way we do and how we might unwittingly sustain a cycle of needless worry, blinding ourselves to the positive aspects of our lives.