A view from Ayesha Walawalkar, when Meerkats meet Meta

As seen in Campaign UK.

At a conservative estimate, we are three times more likely to notice negative news than positive.

Negative stimuli have been demonstrated to elicit a much larger neural response in our brains than positive or neutral ones, starting from about the age of one.

In other words, before we can walk or talk, we are programmed to pay more attention to bad stuff.

Human brains, it seems, behave like meerkat sentinels, constantly scanning for signals that could mean danger, and deprioritising the happier or more familiar sights and sounds that tell us everything is fine.

In theory, it’s one of the evolutionary tricks that has kept our species alive for so long.

It’s also why headlines about disasters and scandals sell newspapers so effectively, and why we rubber neck at road accidents rather than pretty scenery.

Our behaviours and attitudes are shaped most powerfully by bad news, experiences and information.

This “negativity bias” means that we not only register bad news more readily, but we tend to believe bad news more than good, and to dwell on negative experiences for longer than positive ones. We remember perceived insults and failures better than praise.

A single negative comment lingers in the memory and continues to irritate while umpteen pleasant exchanges throughout the day wash over us without leaving a trace. In this way, we learn far more from unpleasant experiences than happy ones.

But given that we no longer need to learn to avoid the dangerous predators that stalked our ancestors, the question is what exactly are we learning nowadays when we dwell on trauma and a constant diet of angry, scary or depressing news?

Harvard Business Review points out that in the corporate world, negativity bias teaches us to be risk averse and hyper cautious – even in the face of radical technology advances and market disruption that pose genuinely existential threats to a business: “We pay so much attention to bad things – reliving them, imagining them, avoiding them – that we let fear run our lives and become irrationally cautious.”

Among teams tasked with driving transformation, just one voice of negativity can cast a long shadow that undermines the confidence of an otherwise upbeat and enthusiastic unit and paralyses decision making.

Experimenting, breaking rules and trying new things is an essential part of creativity – but experimenting inevitably carries a risk of failure.

So, for a species that is “Devastated by a word of criticism, but unmoved by a shower of praise,” a relentless focus on good news, emphasising progress rather than failure and celebrating every win (big or small) is the only way to drown out the power of the bad and minimise fear of intellectual risk taking.

Perhaps more concerning than the broad impact of negativity bias on business is the way in which negativity drives consumption of online news and social media.

A major study published recently in Nature magazine analysed the causal effect of negative emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories.

The dataset comprised more than 100,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated 5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million impressions.

The study found that although positive words were slightly more prevalent overall, negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates and positive words decreased them.

In fact, for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. In a highly competitive online news environment “clickbait” headlines therefore inevitably become ever-more outrageous, upsetting and negative in order to drive cost effectiveness.

Previous studies have also linked negative language in online content to user engagement, ie sharing. The extent of negativity embedded in content has been directly correlated to speed and virality of online diffusion, and stories in social media perceived as negative garner more reactions.

And then, of course, there is the algorithmic structure of platforms like Facebook which both magnify and reinforce our negativity biases.

From 2016 to 2019, Facebook gave “angry” emoji reactions to posts five times as much weight as “likes” in deciding which posts to show other users because their machine learning algorithms found posts that angered people fuelled more engagement than posts that pleased them.

The resulting proliferation of posts including toxic content and misinformation created significant debate within the company, but with slight modification the algorithm continues to optimise for content that gets a strong reaction, as do similar algorithms for competitor social media platforms.

Though the costs of this constant diet of negativity to our mental and emotional wellbeing are still uncounted, it seems we’ve succeeded in turning our sentinel brain – designed to protect us from attack – into its own worst enemy.

Until we’re equally capable of designing algorithms that can protect us from ourselves, we need to self-regulate: to switch off and give the meerkat a rest.