Why does so much news seem negative? Human attention may be to blame

Ever wonder why there’s so much bad news out there? Maybe it’s because people find bad news more interesting than good news. A new study involving more than 1,000 people across 17 countries spanning every continent but Antarctica concludes that, on average, people pay more attention to negative news than to positive news. Sections of a USA Today newspapers rest together, Monday, Aug. 5, 2019, in Norwood, Mass. (Photo: Steven Senne, AP) The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint that this human bias toward negative news might be a large part of what drives negative news coverage. But the results also revealed that this...