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The obsession with the birthrates of the poor has a grim history, and is used by the rich to transfer blame.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26 th August 2020

When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I naïvely imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the world's environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse.

Next week the BirthStrike movement - founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse - will dissolve itself, as its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had "underestimated the power of 'overpopulation' as a growing form of climate breakdown denial".

It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.

The formula for calculating people's environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT). The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one third of the responsibility for increased consumption. But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world's poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.

Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown. Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.

At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average, "All these things we talk about wouldn't be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago." I doubt that any of those who nodded and clapped were thinking, "yes, I urgently need to disappear."

In 2019, she appeared in an advertisement for British Airways, whose customers produce more greenhouse gas emissions on one flight than many of the world's people generate in a year. If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.

She proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don't want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.

The excessive emphasis on population growth has a grim history. Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th Century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor. Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal Famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India's rice, on the Indians "breeding like rabbits". In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on "too many people for too little land", and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.

Another of the charity's patrons, Paul Ehrlich, whose incorrect predictions about mass famine helped to provoke the current population panic, once argued that the US should "coerce" India into "sterilising all Indian males with three or more children", by making food aid conditional on this policy. This proposal was similar to the brutal programme that Indira Gandhi later introduced, with financial support from the UN and the World Bank.

Foreign aid from the UK was funding crude and dangerous sterilisation in India as recently as 2011, on the grounds that this policy was helping to "fight climate change". Some of the victims of this programme allege that they were forced to participate. At the same time, the UK government was pouring billions of pounds of aid into developing coal, gas and oil plants, in India and other nations. It blamed the poor for the crisis it was helping to cause.

Malthusiasm slides easily into racism. The great majority of the world's population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about "barbaric", "degenerate" people "outbreeding" the "superior races". These claims have been revived today by the far right, promoting conspiracy theories about "white replacement" and "white genocide". When affluent white people wrongly transfer blame for their environmental impacts to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.

The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK. This too has a grisly heritage: the pioneering conservationist Madison Grant promoted, alongside his environmental work, the idea that the "Nordic master race" was being "overtaken" in the US by "worthless race types." As president of the Immigration Restriction League, he helped to engineer the vicious 1924 Immigration Act.

But, as there are some genuine ecological impacts of population growth, how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty, whose effect is felt disproportionately by women.

So a good way of deciding whether someone's population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty. Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind, or our own financial sector's processing of money stolen abroad? Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?

Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers. Until then, we should resist attempts by the rich to demonise the poor.

www.monbiot.com

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The obsession with the birthrates of the poor has a grim history, and is used by the rich to transfer blame. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th August 2020 When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists...

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Brothers Osborne - It Ain’t My Fault (Official Music Video)

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Observe slow changes

Factfulness is . . . recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.

To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change.

* Keep track of gradual improvements. A small change every year can translate to a huge change over decades.

* Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing.

* Talk to Grandpa. If you want to be reminded of how values have changed, think about your grandparents' values and how they differ from yours.

* Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today's culture must also have been yesterday's, and will also be tomorrow's.
Back to the list of 10 Factfulness rules of thumb
To read our book Factfulness, go to the library or order your own copy here

***

This page is under construction. We are working on it (and a lot of other pages too). If you need this particular page urgently, you can always drop us a line, and we might be able to squeeze it to the top of our prio list... Contact us at [email protected] .

Japanese: このページを含め、多くの出典ページは現在改稿中です。このページの情報がいますぐ知りたいという方は [email protected] までご連絡ください。

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Factfulness is . . . recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes. To control the destiny instinct, remember slow change is still change.

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Photo by Nonki Azariah on Unsplash

What would our world be like, if everyone stopped GENERALIZING?

The other night my partner and I were sitting in front of the TV, watching some show called North Woods Law. He watches it a few nights per week, while I ignore it and play on my phone. Sometimes it piques my interest, when they rescue baby animals, but usually I spend the hour rolling my eyes, as Dave verbally speculates and...

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The Toxic Global Disaster of Generalization

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The other night my partner and I were sitting in front of the TV, watching some show called North Woods Law. He watches it a few nights per week, while I ignore it and play on my phone. Sometimes it...

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When something goes wrong, are you more likely to own up to the mistakes you made, or play the blame game?

Many people are quick to point fingers and play the blame game. In fact, recent research has shown that we expect this behavior to happen. We expect to experience others engaging in blame-shifting, placing the blame on others for their own mistakes.

My hands aren't clean. I've blamed people for my own mistakes more than once, that's for sure. Why? It's easy.

Why We Blame Others

Simply put, it's much easier to place the blame on someone else than to take full responsibility for your actions. It's also easier to blame someone for our actions rather than take a deeper look at why we made the mistake that we did and face possible consequences - whether it was something you did at work or something that happened during a tiff between you and your partner. Blame shifting takes less effort, and it's easier on us emotionally - at least in the moment.

"Blame is like another defense mechanism," says Talkspace provider Cynthia Catchings, LCSW-S. "We could call it denial or projection, because it helps us preserve our sense of self-esteem or pride by avoiding awareness of our own issues."

Why do we use defense mechanisms? To protect ourselves - whether it's from criticism, negative consequences, attention, whatever it is you're afraid of. You might even be in denial that you are, in fact, the one who's making mistakes.

"We can think of it as a tool we use when we're in attack mode," Catchings adds. Alternatively, she notes that some people blame others in an attempt to hurt them - which is certainly not cool!

Furthermore, it's possible that you might have some deep rooted negative experiences from your childhood that make you predisposed to acting in this way. "Psychologically, we can also see that attachment issues can create problems that manifest when we grow up," Catchings explains. "Insecure and ambivalent attachments can lead to us not accepting responsibilities and finding blaming easier."

Negative Consequences of Blaming Others

Seldom does blaming others for our mistakes come without consequences. It might feel like we're winning in the moment, benefitting ourselves when we don't take responsibility for our actions, but that's definitely not the case in the long run. Blaming others can, and likely will, backfire on you, leaving you wishing you never played the blame game in the first place.

If it wasn't obvious, those you blame will realize it, and they're not going to be happy that you're not owning up to your own blunders.

"Typically, when we engage in this behavior, people around us might start to resent us or even walk away," says Catchings. "Another result can be the loss of communication or trust. People who are victimized start to feel like they are walking on eggshells and avoid communicating to prevent having to experience the blaming."

Blaming others obviously isn't just affecting you in the long run, it's also affecting those who you're pointing fingers at. According to Catchings, "This can lead to low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness, and even permanent emotional damage if the behavior doesn't change and/or the person affected doesn't look for professional help."

You might end up losing friendships, relationships, or jobs, depending on what your situation is. "[Blaming] can also lead to loneliness and abandonment, since the people around those who blame can leave and never come back," Catchings warns.

How to Stop This Behavior

As with many toxic behaviors, acknowledging that you have the problem is the first step to addressing it. Even acknowledging it might not be easy for you, since finally, you'll have to take the blame yourself, and hold yourself accountable for your actions. If you're a chronic blamer, it might have been a while since you took responsibility for yourself.

"Family and friends can help by being understanding and helpful. It is different to hear a kind voice telling us that there is a problem instead of hearing someone yelling at us that we need help," says Catchings.

Looping in a few trustworthy people, folks you can count on, can assist with accountability - and act as a support system. It's easier to make positive changes in our lives when we have people on our side, rooting us on...and kindly calling us out when we deviate from the new less blamey path we've set out on.

Actively notice your thought process the next time you make a mistake. Where does your mind jump to first? Do you want to blame someone, or do you want to explain yourself and take ownership for what you've done? Make a conscious effort to choose the second option - although that's easier said than done. Especially if you're not accustomed to it!

"Professional help is the most recommended way to learn how to stop this behavior," says Catchings. "This behavior might be a result of unresolved childhood experiences and issues and consulting a therapist would be the best way to make a true change in our lives." If you're interested in finding out whether a therapist can help you dig to the root of this problem and help you avoid this behavior down the line, try talking to an online therapist today.

We have to learn to be able to hold ourselves accountable for mistakes big and small, even though it can be scary. It's not easy to own up to our errors, but without a doubt, it's the right thing to do.

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Why Do We Blame Others For Our Mistakes? | Talkspace

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When something goes wrong, are you more likely to own up to the mistakes you made, or play the blame game? Many people are quick to point fingers and play the blame game. In fact, recent research has shown that we expect this behavior to happen.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - With Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House, progressive lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing the Biden administration to act ever more aggressively on climate change.

A week after President Joe Biden signed executive orders intended to combat the worst effects of global warming, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers urged him to go even further and declare a national emergency on climate change. Along with other liberal lawmakers, the independent Vermont senator and the New York Democratic congresswoman introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would direct Biden to declare a national climate emergency.

Such a declaration, similar to one issued by former President Donald Trump on construction of a southern border wall, would give Biden more power to combat global warming, including reinstating a ban on crude-oil exports and forcing companies to manufacture solar panels, electric-car charging stations and other elements of the so-called green economy.

The lawmakers introduced a similar resolution in 2019, but this time they have high-level support, including a recent statement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that Biden should consider declaring an emergency to take additional actions on climate.

"If there ever was an emergency, climate is one,″ the New York Democrat told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last week, adding that an emergency declaration would give Biden "more flexibility.″

Unlike Trump's "stupid wall,″ climate change is a real crisis, Schumer said. "We have to do something about climate. We don't have any more time.″

The bill requiring an emergency declaration faces an uphill road in the Senate, where a 60-vote threshold is needed. So far, just four senators have signed onto the bill, which faces stiff opposition from Republicans and likely resistance from moderate Democrats.

The White House declined to comment on the legislation.

Biden signed executive orders Jan. 27 pausing oil and gas leasing on federal land and targeting subsidies for those industries. The directives also aim to conserve 30 percent of the country's lands and waters in the next 10 years, double the nation's offshore wind energy and move to an all-electric federal vehicle fleet, among other changes.

The sweeping plan is aimed at staving off the worst of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. But it carries political risk for the president and Democrats as oil- and coal-producing states face likely job losses from moves to sharply increase U.S. reliance on clean energy such as wind and solar power.

Sanders said the climate emergency has long been clear.

"As we face the global crisis of climate change ... it is imperative that the United States lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy," Sanders said. "What we need now is congressional leadership to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and tell them that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of the planet.″

Ocasio-Cortez, a co-sponsor of the sprawling Green New Deal and, like Sanders, a hero of the progressive left, said in a statement that the U.S. has made progress since lawmakers introduced the emergency resolution nearly two years ago.

"But now we have to meet the moment,″ she said. "We are out of time and excuses. Our country is in crisis and to address it we will have to mobilize our social and economic resources on a massive scale. We have to start by calling this moment what it is: a national emergency."

The legislation is supported by dozens of environmental groups that have pushed Biden to act quickly and aggressively on climate change.

"We are at a life-changing, civilization-altering moment in our history, as we face a climate crisis that demands a thunderous voice and a full mobilization of every sector to match its scale and its urgency,″ said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which helped draft the Green New Deal.

The emergency proposal "is a good sign that our leaders are finally understanding what young people and climate activists have been shouting from the rooftops for years: bold action must be done now to save our humanity and our future,″ she said.

But Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy panel, said declaring a climate emergency would effectively "muzzle Congress.″

Schumer and other Democrats "want the president to go it alone and produce more punishing regulations, raise energy costs and kill even more American jobs,″ Barrasso said.

Biden has set a goal of eliminating pollution from fossil fuel in the power sector by 2035 and from the U.S. economy overall by 2050, speeding what is already a market-driven growth of solar and wind energy and lessening the country's dependence on oil and gas. The aggressive plan is aimed at slowing human-caused global warming that is magnifying extreme weather events such as deadly wildfires in the West and drenching rains and hurricanes in the East.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., authored the House climate bill. The Senate bill is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both of Massachusetts.

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Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez seek 'climate emergency' declaration

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WASHINGTON (AP) - With Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House, progressive lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are pushing the Biden administration to act ever more aggressively on climate change.

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Single-perspective narratives do students a gross disservice.

Before the release of Selma, I wonder how many people ever reflected on President Lyndon B. Johnson's attitude toward the 1965 marches in Selma. I wonder if anybody thought that conventional wisdom afforded him either too much or too little credit for the Voting Rights Act. I imagine that Johnson's legacy was not on the average American's radar until Selma ripped it into the public consciousness.

The movie compelled many Americans to reconsider their perceptions of Johnson. The curators of his legacy lambasted the film for portraying the 35th president as a prickly antagonist to Martin Luther King Jr., asserting that the film unfairly reduces Johnson to an irascible politician who was forced by King into advancing the Voting Rights Act. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Johnson's top assistant for domestic affairs from 1965 to 1969, wrote in the Washington Post that Selma distorts these facts so considerably that the movie "should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards seasons." Selma director Ava DuVernay fired back, tweeting that the "notion that Selma was LBJ's idea is jaw dropping."

How can subjects such as this remain dormant for long periods of time, only to be awakened by a critically acclaimed film? Califano is not the first, nor will he be the last, to mount a defense of a historical figure who is shortchanged by a movie. After the 2012 release of Lincoln, U.S. Representative Joe Courtney, a Democrat from Connecticut, wrote to Steven Spielberg to complain that the film erroneously showed two of his state's legislators voting against the amendment that abolished slavery. The 2012 release of the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady prompted Rob Wilson, a member of parliament, to call for a debate in the British House of Commons, claiming that its director, Phyllida Lloyd, painted an "intrusive and unfair" picture of the former prime minister.
Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative-a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages.
These partisans have not been hiding; they are only drawn into the public realm when fear is evoked. It is this same anxiety that's emerged in Oklahoma because of the new Advanced Placement U.S. History guidelines. In a later interview, Califano captured the root of that anxiety: "Many, many of our young people get their view of history from films and television," he said. "It's important for people who make movies that claim to be historically accurate to be accurate." When the established memory of figures and events from the past is challenged, both the defenders and opponents of that memory will fight to influence the young.

The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative-a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same. Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses. And rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

Califano is explicitly worried that future Americans will remember Lyndon B. Johnson differently than he does. Oklahoma state Representative Dan Fisher, a Republican, appears worried that future Americans will have a different understanding of their country's past than he does, too. Fisher recently introduced a bill that would have defunded AP U.S. History in the state, claiming that the College Board, which runs the AP program, published a revised framework that harps on "what is bad about America" and fails to teach "American exceptionalism." (The controversial effort garnered a good deal of criticism, and Fisher has since backtracked on the legislation.) The memories of Fisher, Califano, Courtney, and Wilson have clashed with the memories of others.

Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions-but that collection depends on the memories chosen.

Memories make for a risky foundation: As events recede further into the past, the facts are distorted or augmented by entirely new details-something the NBC news anchor Brian Williams learned to devastating effect. An individual who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge probably remembers the events in Selma differently than someone who helped Johnson advance legislation in Washington. Both people construct unique memories while informing perfectly valid histories. Just as there is a plurality of memories, so, too, is there a plurality of histories.

Scholars who read a diverse set of historians who are all focused on the same specific period or event are engaging in historiography. I didn't encounter historiography until college, and it had the same effect on my opinion of textbooks that The Jungle had on consumers of pork. This approach exposes textbooks as nothing more than a compilation of histories that the authors deemed to be most relevant and useful.

In historiography, the barrier between historian and student is dropped, exposing a conflict-ridden landscape. A diplomatic historian approaches an event from the perspective of the most influential statesmen (who are most often white males), analyzing the context, motives, and consequences of their decisions. A cultural historian peels back the objects, sights, and sounds of a period to uncover humanity's underlying emotions and anxieties. A Marxist historian adopts the lens of class conflict to explain the progression of events. There are intellectual historians, social historians, and gender historians, among many others. Historians studying the same topic will draw different interpretations-sometimes radically so, depending on the sources they draw from. Fisher's bill captures high schools' inability to accept the absence of a single "history" and the co-existence of "histories."
History is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high.
In a recent analysis for The Atlantic about the controversies surrounding the AP framework and other history curricula, Jacoba Urist points out that history is "about explaining and interpreting past events analytically." If students are really to learn and master these analytical tools, then it is absolutely essential that they read a diverse set of historians and learn how brilliant men and women who are scrutinizing the same topic can reach different conclusions. Rather than constructing a curriculum based on the muddled consensus of boards, legislatures, and think tanks, schools should teach students history through historiography. The shortcomings of one historian become apparent after reading the work of another one on the list. Will every perspective be afforded its due? Probably not. But the students will be better equipped to recognize weaknesses in an argument and resist the allure of a simplified national narrative.

Although, as Urist notes, the AP course is "designed to teach students to think like historians," my own experience in that class suggests that it fails to achieve that goal. The course's framework has always served as an outline of important concepts aiming to allow educators flexibility in how to teach; it makes no reference to historiographical conflicts. Historiography was an epiphany for me because I had never before come face-to-face with how historians think and reason-how they construct an argument, what sources animate that approach, and how their position responds to other historians.

When I took AP U.S. History, I jumbled these diverse histories into one indistinct narrative. Although the test involved open-ended essay questions, I was taught that graders were looking for a firm thesis-forcing students to adopt a side. The AP test also, unsurprisingly, rewards students who cite a wealth of supporting details. By the time I took the test in 2009, I was a master at "checking boxes," weighing political factors equally against those involving socioeconomics and ensuring that previously neglected populations like women and ethnic minorities received their due. I did not know that I was pulling ideas from different historiographical traditions. I still subscribed to the idea of a prevailing national narrative and served as an unwitting sponsor of synthesis, oblivious to the academic battles that made such synthesis impossible.

Few examples illustrate the relevance of disputed memory like the controversies surrounding the erection of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Maya Lin's winning design contrasted with the rest of the capital, its black granite-devoid of ornamentation, save the names of every fallen soldier-clinging close to the earth rather than soaring above it. The design prompted a wave of opposition. Tom Carhart, a Pentagon lawyer and Vietnam War veteran, called the proposed memorial a " black gash of shame." "Black walls, the universal color of sorrow and dishonor. Hidden in a hole, as if in shame," he argued, encapsulating the revulsion felt by many Vietnam vets. "Is this really how America would memorialize our offering?"

Like Califano on Johnson and Fisher on American exceptionalism, Carhart was distressed that the lasting national memory of the Vietnam War might be self-loathing. No doubt mindful of the American public's hostility to soldiers during the war, Carhart likely found the proposed monument threatening. It was ultimately constructed as designed with a few concessions: A flagpole was built atop the wall and a statue of three American soldiers was added next to it. The memories had collided-and they continued to collide.

Although there may be an inclination to seek to establish order where there is chaos, that urge must be resisted in teaching history. Public controversies over memory are hardly new. Students must be prepared to confront divisiveness, not conditioned to shoehorn agreement into situations where none is possible. Historiography is potentially freeing for the next generation of students. When conflict is accepted rather than resisted, it becomes possible for different conceptions of American history to co-exist. There is no longer a need to appoint a victor.

More importantly, the historiographical approach avoids pursuing truth for the sake of satisfying a national myth. Fisher's demand for a curriculum that covers "American exceptionalism," a term that often risks masking the horrors of America's past with its greatest triumphs, hints at this risk. The country's founding fathers crafted some of the finest expressions of personal liberty and representative government the world has ever seen; many of them also held fellow humans in bondage. This paradox is only a problem if the goal is to view the founding fathers as faultless, perfect individuals. If multiple histories are embraced, no one needs to fear that one history will be lost.

Lionization and demonization are best left to the heroes and villains of fairy tales. History is not indoctrination. It is a wrestling match. For too long, the emphasis has been on pinning the opponent. It is time to shift the focus to the struggle itself. Conflict does not necessarily demand a resolution. Disagreements among highly educated, well-informed people will continue. Why should history ignore this reality? There is no better way to use the past to inform the present than by accepting the impossibility of a definitive history-and by ensuring that current students are equipped to grapple with the contested memories in their midst.

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Single-perspective narratives do students a gross disservice.

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This article is from the archive of our partner .

Africa has an image problem. Or, put another way, the West has a perception problem. Because when we talk about Africa, more often than not, it's to talk about catastrophes and epidemics, and to conflate a single country with a 1 billion-strong continent. Take this recent Time magazine article, "Africa's Drinking Problem," which took a few scattered facts and anecdotes about alcoholism in Kenya and decided to create a story about an entire population's issues with alcohol. "While governments in the West are considering minimum pricing standards for alcohol, in nearly a dozen countries across Africa... governments are applying tax breaks to booze," writes Jessica Hatcher. (Nearly a dozen...out of the 54 nations that are part of the African Union. Let's just say the article's argument deteriorates from there.)

Africacheck.org, based in South Africa, responded to the Time piece today, addressing a key issue: The tendency to make sweeping generalizations about entire continents. According to the World Health Organization's 2011 Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, the same report that served the basis for the Time article, Kenya ranks 118th out of 189 countries for heavy drinking. Also worth noting:

The WHO Africa region "excludes seven African countries with large Muslim populations - Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Djibouti, Morocco, Somalia and Sudan"

"The WHO Africa region's per capita alcohol consumption is only 0.02 litres higher at 6.15 litres a year. This is lower than Europe and the Americas, which consume 12.18 litres and 8.67 litres respectively."

The WHO report doesn't have statistics on the number of heavy drinkers in 20 African countries (so, nearly half of the region)

So no, Africa does not have a drinking problem, though Time's piece fits into the larger, convenient Western narrative of Africa as a barren continent plagued by problems. Even people who know that Africa isn't a country, and that's not everyone (you too, Rick Ross), can't get past the images of poverty stricken villages, violence-plagued townships, AIDS, malaria and misery. The Time article, though purportedly about a continent-wide binge drinking epidemic, sprinkles in familiar imagery, namely, corrupt politicians and poor people rummaging through trash heaps next to pigs. Jina Moore, a journalist previously based in the Democratic Republic of Congo, described the single-mindedness of Africa portrayals in the Boston Review in 2012 when she wrote:

We [writers] blame our editors, who (we like to say) oversimplify our copy and cut out context. They also introduce clichéd shorthand, such as "Arab north versus Christian and animist south" (Sudan), or boilerplate background, such as "the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed" (Rwanda). Virtually any story can be sold more easily if set in a "war-torn country."

For these tendencies, our editors in turn often blame readers, whom they assume can't or won't follow us through villages with difficult-to-pronounce names or narratives with nuanced conclusions or moral ambiguities.

Ultimately, the problem with journalism from Africa isn't about professional conventions. It's about all of us-writers and readers, producers and viewers. We continue a storytelling tradition that hasn't fundamentally changed since Joseph Conrad slapped Congo with "the heart of darkness" label.

The other major narrative often attached to the continent is the concept of the White Savior. When the KONY2012 viral campaign launched last year, Ugandan bloggers took issue with the campaign's portrayal of Ugandans: poor, helpless Africans who can't do anything to solve their own problems. As Ugandan blogger Rosebell Kagumire explained in a video:

I think it's all about trying to make a difference, but how do you tell the story of Africans? It's much more important what the story is, actually, because if you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless... you shouldn't be telling my story if you don't believe that I also have the power to change what is going on.

In a 2009 Ted Talk, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke on the dangers of a "single story," the idea that an entire culture can be summed up in one narrative. Adichie described meeting her American roommate after moving to the United States to attend Drexel University. The roommate expressed an interest in listening to Adichie's "tribal" music, wondered where she'd learned English (it's Nigeria's official language) and assumed she didn't know how to use a stove. Adichie continued:

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

Adichie offers a solution to the single story problem that is both simple and complex: We should try to move beyond it. "Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes," she said. "But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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Confusing a Country for a Continent: How We Talk About Africa

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Africa has an image problem. Or, put another way, the West has a perception problem. Because when we talk about Africa, more often than not, it's to talk about catastrophes and epidemics, and to conflate a single country with a continent.

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Map created by reddit user edtheredted using thetruesize.com While it doesn’t look it, Africa is big, really big. In fact, Africa’s true size is 30 million square km, just under twice the size of Russia or bigger than Canada, the United States and China put together! As map nerds and/or West...

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The True Size of Africa

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Become part of our international hearpeers community and find out everything you need to know about cochlear implants and other hearing solutions.

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How Hans Rosling can help us improve our mental health

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Nowadays, it seems that bad news is aplenty. The news constantly blares the most recent death, reminding us of our mortality. Our social media accounts are drowning with depressing news. And no matter how isolated we try to become, terrible news always seems to be around the corner ( what? You mean there's another fire somewhere??).

With this much negativity, it seems that we're in the wrong time period to be happy. Yet, Hans Rosling has something to say about our "mega misconception that 'the world is getting worse'" (2018, 40)

In his book Factfulness: Ten reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think, Hans Rosling points out that despite the many challenges we face today, the world is actually in a much better place. In this book, he introduces 10 different instincts that lead us to make incorrect and pessimistic assumptions about the world. As I read the book, I found that the first two - gap and negativity instincts are the most helpful in allowing me to have a more positive outlook on the world.

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Beat The Negativity And Gap Instinct To Be Happier

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Nowadays, it seems that bad news is aplenty. The news constantly blares the most recent death, reminding us of our mortality. Our social media accounts are drowning with depressing news. And no matter how isolated we try to become, terrible news always seems to be around the corner ( what?

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Most of us have a clear sense of right and wrong. But what happens when we view politics through a moral lens? This week, we talk with psychologist Linda Skitka about how moral certainty can produce moral blinders - and endanger democracy.

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Koreen is a model and artist based in L.A. She created the WNRS card game with the intention of empowering meaningful connections with others. As a photojournalist her camera was a passport to people, allowing her to talk to anyone about anything. She built the WNRS platform to bring more meaningful connections to everyday life. See her original artwork and join our online community.

For business inquires: info@notreallystrangers.com

Customer service: customercare@notreallystrangers.com

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Koreen is a model and artist based in L.A. She created the WNRS card game with the intention of empowering meaningful connections with others. As a photojournalist her camera was a passport to people, allowing her to talk to anyone about anything.

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Significance

News coverage of current affairs is predominantly negative. American accounts of this tendency tend to focus on journalistic practices, but this cannot easily account for negative news content around the world. It is more likely that negativity in news is a product of a human tendency to be more attentive to negative news content. Just how widespread is this tendency? Our evidence suggest that, all around the world, the average human is more physiologically activated by negative than by positive news stories. Even so, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. The latter finding is of real significance for newsmakers: Especially in a diversified media environment, news producers should not underestimate the audience for positive news content.

Abstract

What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly to negative than positive information. "Negativity biases" in human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stimuli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level variation in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results make clear the pervasiveness of negativity biases on average, they help account for the tendency for audience-seeking news around the world to be predominantly negative. Insofar as our results highlight individual-level variation, however, they highlight the potential for more positive content, and suggest that there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic wisdom that "if it bleeds, it leads."

Background

Our research is motivated by 2 widely recognized features of modern-day communications. First, mass-mediated news is a central and critical component of large-scale representative democracy. Media provide a critical flow of information between elites and citizens and are a vital mechanism for democratic accountability. Second, negative tone is a defining feature of news; good news, in contrast, is nearly synonymous with the absence of news. This asymmetry in coverage has been the focus of a considerable body of work on mass media in the United States ( 1, 2), and it is evident in studies of media content and journalists' decisions cross-nationally ( 3⇓ - 5). Importantly, this work suggests that, even as news coverage has been negative for many years, it has also been increasing in recent decades.

In sum, the nature and quality of mass-mediated news content is central to the nature and quality of representative democracy, and that content is systematically skewed toward negative information. This is partly a function of the demand for negative news, since market forces will produce news in line with consumers' interests, including negativity ( 6). Even so, the tone of news content has been cited as a source of systematic deficiencies in what citizens know about their governments and the world around them ( 1). Inadequate or incorrect political knowledge, citizen apathy, and disengagement-these are just some of the consequences attributed to the overwhelmingly negative nature of news content.

These facts point to the importance of understanding why media content is the way it is. They also highlight the need to understand if and why media consumers prioritize negative coverage. Concerns about media coverage typically focus on the supply side of the media-i.e., choices of journalists and editors-but the demand side may be equally important. Even as people say they want more positive news, they systematically select more negative news ( 7), for instance. This should come as no surprise: There are, after all, burgeoning literatures across the social sciences identifying negative biases in human information processing and behavior ( 8⇓ ⇓ ⇓ - 12).

What explains the apparently widespread preference for negative information? One account is rooted in evolutionary theory. Attention to negativity may have been advantageous for survival. Negative information alerts to potential dangers ( 13); it has special value in terms of "diagnosticity" ( 14), or the "vigilance" ( 15) that is required to avoid negative outcomes. This account of the negativity bias is evident in literatures in physiology ( 16), neurology ( 17, 18), and, particularly, work on the importance of "orienting responses" in evolutionary biology ( 19). This account leads to the expectation of a negativity bias present across all human populations.

Another account is evident in work on cultural psychology and anthropology, as well as recent work on "media systems." This research emphasizes the possibility that there are cross-cultural differences in negativity biases. There is, after all, work examining cross-cultural variation in related psychological phenomena, including self-assessments ( 20, 21), self-esteem ( 22), satisfaction ( 23), optimism ( 24), and reasoning ( 25). One frequent contrast in this work is between what seem to be more optimistic countries in the West (typically the United States) and less optimistic countries in the East (typically Japan). And, while cross-cultural explorations into negativity biases specifically are rare, several important exceptions find evidence of cross-national differences ( 23, 26, 27).

Systematic cross-national differences in responsiveness to news content might provide clues about how this negativity bias arises. What might drive this cross-cultural variance? The literature on cultural values points to some possibilities ( 28). Societies deal with anxiety about future uncertainties in different ways, and the extent to which members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations may well affect the tendency to focus on negative information. A range of institutional factors may also matter. Societal tension between groups, and especially conflict that has crystallized in the polarization of political-party systems, may matter for negativity, at least where attentiveness to news coverage is concerned. Another dimension of variability is rooted in the institutionally coded professional practices of journalists ( 29). A strong professional requirement that journalists routinely cover politics in conflictual terms may also lead to viewers' habitual expectation and attention to negativity.

Note that neither the evolutionary nor the cultural-institutional account depends on a conscious desire for negative information so much as an unconscious adaptation or learned tendency to prioritize negative information. Note also that the 2 accounts are not in competition-negativity biases are almost certainly conditioned by both. Consider work on the importance of "social learning," alongside biology, as the basis of culture ( 30) and work in neurology and physiology on culture-gene coevolution ( 31, 32). We also do not want to discount the possibility that variation in negativity biases is not a primarily cross-cultural phenomenon, but an individual one. There already is work suggesting that negativity biases in reactions to video news vary across gender, for instance ( 33). And there is a growing literature focused on differences in negativity biases across political ideologies ( 34⇓ - 36).

Individual-level variables may be at the root of cross-cultural variation, insofar as individual-level factors vary across cultures. Individual-level variation may also be entirely independent of culture or work differently across cultures. Thus far, we simply do not know the extent to which heightened activation in response to negative news content is a culturally determined phenomenon. This not only limits our understanding of negativity biases generally, it limits our understanding of the demand and supply of negative news content.

Cross-National Physiological Responses to News

Our cross-national work responds to growing pleas for a more comparative approach to (political) psychology ( 37) and more comparative work in political communication as well ( 38). We also build upon a small, but growing, literature focused on cross-national experimentation in psychology and economics ( 39, 40).

Our analyses are based on laboratory experiments run in 17 countries: Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Senegal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also have 2 separate samples in Canada, Anglophone and Francophone, and 2 separate samples in Israel, Jewish and Palestinian. Our results are based on 1,156 respondents; to our knowledge, this is the largest and most broadly comparative psychophysiological study in the social sciences to date. (SI Appendix discusses sampling decisions in detail; SI Appendix, Fig. S1 shows the distribution of respondents by country and gender, and SI Appendix, Fig. S2 shows the distribution of age by country.) The study protocol is straightforward: Respondents watched 7 randomly ordered BBC World News stories on a laptop computer while wearing noise-cancelling headphones and sensors on their fingers to capture skin conductance and blood volume pulse. (Videos were subtitled where necessary, and tests suggested that subtitles do not change the results presented here. See SI Appendix, Table A5.)

There already is a considerable body of work examining negativity biases in psychophysiology; there is a growing literature on psychophysiological reactions to political news content as well ( 33, 41, 42). Physiological measures have the advantage of capturing real-time, often subconscious, reactions to news content. We examined normalized skin-conductance levels (nSCLs), indicating physiological activation connected to, e.g., "orienting responses," and the "fight or flight" response. We also relied on heart-rate variability (HRV)-specifically, the root mean square of the successive differences (RMSSD), capturing a combination of activation (increasing heart rate) and attentiveness (decreasing heart rate). (For more thorough accounts of both measures, see, e.g., refs. 43 and 44.) Note that past work also views HRV as a measure of "emotional regulation" ( 45). The 2 perspectives are similar-each focuses on variation caused by the excitatory sympathetic nervous system and inhibitory parasympathetic nervous system, and each views higher HRV as an indicator of both activating and calming/focusing responses.

The tone of video content was the primary independent variable. Negativity was measured as an interval-level measure based on the average of second-by-second coding by expert coders (outlined in more detail in SI Appendix). Expert coders' assessments were in line with assessments from study participants. (Average story ratings, by country, are shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S3.)

Analyses use data at several different levels of aggregation. Variation in heart rate was necessarily measured over longer intervals-in this case, over the course of entire news stories. Analysis of RMSSD values is thus at the respondent-story level. Skin conductance can be measured over very short time periods; here, we examined nSCL using a time-series panel dataset in which each respondent was a "panel" and nSCL was captured at 1-s intervals. The processing of physiological measures is discussed in SI Appendix.

The basic results for RMSSD, estimated across all participants in all countries, are illustrated in Fig. 1. Results are based on the regression model shown in SI Appendix, Table S2. (SI Appendix, Table S3 reproduces the same model, assigning weights to individuals so that all country-level samples are weighted equally; results are not substantively different.) The shift shown in Fig. 1, from an average story tone of −2 (positive) to +2 (negative), is equivalent to 10% of the observed SD in RMSSD. Participants thus exhibited higher variability in heart rate during negative news stories than they did during positive news stories. Given past work on HRV and media content ( 44), we interpret these results as reflecting higher attentiveness and arousal during these negative stories.

Results for nSCL are illustrated in Fig. 2, based on second-by-second models shown in SI Appendix, Table S4. Note that these results are similar to those using the same respondent-stimulus-level data as was used for RMSSD; these models are included in SI Appendix, Table S2 (without country weights) and SI Appendix, Table S3 (with country weights). The second-by-second models of nSCL interacted negativity with time (in seconds, by story), given past work suggesting that the impact of negativity on skin conductance decreases over the course of a news story ( 42). Fig. 2 shows the estimated impact of negative (+2) content, versus neutral (0) and positive (−2) content, 20 s into a news story. The shift shown in Fig. 2 is equivalent to 65% of the observed SD in nSCL. The evidence supports the expectation that physiological arousal is greater for negative news coverage than for positive news coverage.

Note that while these findings are in line with past work, they are among the first to rely on such a large sample, focused on actual video news content, and not based exclusively on Anglo-American respondents. The fact that a negativity bias in physiological responses to video news is readily evident in cross-national data using stimuli with high external validity is of real significance. To be clear: This study directly demonstrates that humans around the world are more activated by negative news coverage. We are, perhaps, one step closer to accounting for the high frequency of negative news content around the world.

Recall, however, that our principal goal is to examine the possibility of systematic cross-national variation. Figs. 3 and 4 offer the critical diagnostic test. Fig. 3 shows the estimated effect on RMSSD of a 1-unit increase in negativity, based on models estimated separately for every participant, using the same specification as in SI Appendix, Table S2. The distribution of these estimated effects is shown, by country, where "estimated effects" are the coefficients for the negativity measure. The figure makes clear the high degree of variability underlying the overall result in Fig. 1. On balance, there are more participants to the right of the zero line-suggesting that respondents are more attentive to and activated by negative news stories. Overall, the mean coefficient is greater than zero. But there is a great deal of within-country variability as well. Indeed, Fig. 3 shows asterisks beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test); only Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, and Sweden showed systematically higher RMSSD during negative video content.

The story is relatively similar for nSCL, in Fig. 4, which plots the estimated effect of a 1-unit increase in negativity on nSCL, based on second-by-second models estimated separately for each participant, using the same specification as in SI Appendix, Table S4. Again, results are shown by country, and asterisks are shown beside the countries for which the mean coefficient is significantly greater than zero (based on a 1-tailed t test). Results point to significant negativity biases in 9 of the 17 countries. In 2 countries, New Zealand and Sweden, the impact of negativity is, on average, opposite to our expectations, although not significantly so. (And note that while country-by-country results vary slightly across different model specifications and levels of data aggregation, in all cases, the basic story is the same: an overall average negativity bias, but with a good degree of individual-level difference; SI Appendix.)

Country accounts for very little of the variation in Figs. 3 and 4. ANOVAs suggest that country (included as a factor variable, with no additional controls) accounts for 1.5% of the observed variance in coefficients for RMSSD and 2.7% of the observed variance in coefficients for nSCL. Even if there were cultural, political, and/or media-system variables correlated with cross-national differences, then, it seems unlikely that they would explain much variance, and, indeed, we find no significant correlations between such measures and the coefficients used in Figs. 3 and 4 (SI Appendix, Table A6). This is not to say that there are no systematic individual-level differences-there clearly are significant differences in the ways in which individuals react to negative versus positive news content. Those differences simply do not appear to be strongly connected to country-level contextual factors.

Discussion

Our results suggest that negativity biases in reactions to news content are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Reactions to video news content reveal a mean tendency for humans to be more aroused by and attentive to negative news. That said, there also is considerable individual-level variation around that mean, and, in some instances, country-level samples would not on their own suggest statistically significant negativity biases in responsiveness to video news content.

Note that our results are focused entirely on reactions to news content-they do not run contrary to evidence of other systematic and important cross-cultural differences in psychology and information processing, nor do they counter the claim that deep-seated negativity biases in information processing are endemic. There is, of course, a good deal of work in psychology and neurology highlighting negativity biases in information processing generally ( 13, 16⇓ ⇓ ⇓ ⇓ ⇓ - 22, 46). Our goal has been to examine the degree to which these widely accepted psychological and neurological findings are evidenced in reactions to video news content. This is because we are interested in understanding why news content looks the way it does, and we allow for the possibility that reactions to news content are conditioned by a range of contextual and cultural factors beyond fundamental (physiological and neurological) negativity biases in information processing. That said, our results find little impact of country-level context in conditioning physiological responsiveness to video news.

There are, of course, a number of limitations to this study. We opted for nearly identical stimuli across countries, which has the advantage of comparability, but also means that we capture responses to news that may be different from what is typical in each country. A survey question asking about differences between our BBC and domestic news stories suggests small to moderate observed differences for all (non-U.K.) countries in our study (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). Even so, understanding the demand and supply of news may benefit from further country-specific analysis, targeting not just the tone, but also other varying aspects of news coverage.

We also do not want to discount entirely the possibility that context matters for negativity biases. The diagnosticity, or "outlyingness" ( 47), of negative content may well vary across contexts; those contexts may simply not correspond to the national-cultural samples we examine here. Indeed, even one's own personal information environment, structured by factors such as income and employment, may affect negativity biases and news consumption. All we can say definitively here is that there is no link in our data between physiological reactions to valenced news content and national contexts-political, media, or otherwise.

That said, our results demonstrate a broadly cross-national negativity bias in responsiveness to video news content, while at the time demonstrating a very high degree of individual-level variation. This individual-level variation has important implications for how we understand news production. Most importantly, it suggests that audience-seeking news media need not necessarily be drawn to predominantly negative content. Even as the average tendency may be for viewers to be more attentive to and aroused by negative content, there would appear to be a good number of individuals with rather different or perhaps more mutable preferences. One lesson of our analyses is that work on media coverage and news production should not lose sight of these individual-level differences. For those focused on the substance and nature of news content, individual-level variability in negativity biases highlights the possibility for the audience-seeking success of news coverage that is less systematically negative.

Materials and Methods

There are 6 sections included in SI Appendix. SI Appendix, section A describes the experimental protocol. SI Appendix, section B includes the script used to introduce participants to the experiment. This study was reviewed and approved by the Comité d'Éthique de la Recherche des Arts et des Sciences at the Université de Montréal. Written informed consent was sought from and provided by all participants, using text included in SI Appendix, section C. SI Appendix, section D discusses both sampling and location in each country. SI Appendix, section E describes the processing of physiological data. SI Appendix, section F briefly reviews alternative estimation strategies. For the purposes of education and research, data and replication materials are available through the Harvard Dataverse ( 48).

Acknowledgments

We thank conference participants and colleagues for remarks, some of which were fundamental to the study; in particular, Vin Arceneaux, Chris Dawes, Johanna Dunaway, John Hibbing, Peter John Loewen, and Daniel Rubenson. We thank research coordinators and research assistants at our own and other institutions: Saja Abu-Fani, Maxim Alyukov, Jeremy Adrian, Thiago Barbosa, Alexandre Blanchet, Danin Chen, Yolanda Clatworthy, Lou d'Angelo, Danlin Chen, Veronica Dazzan, Fatou Diop, Thomas Donovan, Marie Fly, Nicole Gileadi, Amanda Hampton, Matthias Heilke, Emma Heffernan, John Jensenius, Gonoi Ken, Saga Khaghani, Robert Lee Vidigal, Ling Liu, Sofie Lovbjerg, Eleonora Marchetti, Radhika Mitra, Alex Nevitte, Hiroki Ogawa, Vijeta Pamnani, Shang Pan, Amma Panin, Shang Pan, Andres Parado, Heidi Payter, Martina Perversi, Felipe Torres Raposo, Tea Rosic, Autumn Szczepanski, Alassane Sow, Dominic Valentino, Omer Yair, and Kirill Zhirkov. We have relied on colleagues to help facilitate experiments abroad and owe special thanks to Michael Bang Petersen, Sharon Barnhardt, Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Fatou Binetou Dial, Ray Duch, Vladimir Gelman, Peiran Jiao, Masaru Kohno, Neils Markwat, Johan Martinsson, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Elin Naurin, Nicholas Sauger, Sergio Splendore, Nurit Tal-Or, Yariv Tsfati, Mathieu Turgeon, and Jack Vowles. Experiments were run by using purpose-built software by Bennett Smith, first designed for work with Stephen McAdams and Elisabeth Gidengil; and preliminary work depended on laboratory space and funding from the Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship and from the Hebrew University Halbert Center. This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.

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Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news

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News coverage of current affairs is predominantly negative. American accounts of this tendency tend to focus on journalistic practices, but this cannot easily account for negative news content around the world. It is more likely that negativity in news is a product of a human tendency to be more attentive to negative news content.