EDITOR'S NOTE: After a career as a reporter, government worker and university administrator, Leslie Boney runs the website boneconnector.com.
We humans have a deep fascination with the negative. It has a big impact on what we perceive about the world.
We appear to be born with a negativity bias. Then we develop the skill over the rest of our lives. As early as
one year old, we pay more attention to adults showing negative emotion, maybe because we instinctively react to threats more than bribes. Researcher Dr. Barbara Fredrickson from UNC-Chapel Hill
has found for adults, it takes three positive emotional experiences to outweigh one negative. John Gottman
finds we focus more on one negative marital interaction than on five positive ones.
When it comes to news, researchers
found each additional negative word added to an online headline increases the clickthrough rate by 2.3% (I’m testing that out with the headline for this piece!). Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson
summarizes it this way: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but like Teflon for positive ones.”
I guess that explains the difference between what people think is going on in with crime, the economy and disease and what the data shows is actually happening.
The latest
Gallup Poll of Americans shows 53% of us think crime is either an “extremely” or “moderately” serious problem in the country; 77% think crime rates are increasing. In fact in
almost every category – rape, aggravated assault, robbery -- crime went down in 2023 and has been declining for years. The homicide rate declined by nearly 13%, the
biggest year-by-year decline on record and half the rate in 1991.
Similarly, an October
Associated Press poll reveals 78% of Americans think the country is going in “the wrong direction.” But holy smokes:
on the economic front, unemployment (3.7%) remains below what I was taught in school was “full employment” (4%), even as the labor force participation rate is going up. Real average wages are up 4.5% over the past three years. This past year, the Standard & Poors Index was up 24%; the NASDAQ 43%. Inflation is down to an annual rate of 3.1%. Our GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.9%, the kind of numbers China used to put up.
Projections for 2024 are positive as well.
Is all this negative perception just a U.S. thing? Nope. Only 37% of people across the world believe their country is
going in the right direction. What are they worried about? The top four things people cite as their biggest worries – inflation, crime, poverty and unemployment – are actually (slightly) improving in most of the world. And other indicators are better than ever. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof
made the case that this past year was “maybe the best one yet for humanity.” Here are a few things he noted:
- We have never had such a low percentage of the world in extreme poverty – on average 100,000 people a day are emerging from extreme poverty;
- We have never had such a low rate of child mortality – a million fewer children died before age 5 this year than died in 2016;
- We are on the verge of completely eradicating two catastrophic diseases, polio and Guinea worm disease and making exciting progress fighting sickle cell disease, Alzheimer’s, and obesity.
Why don’t you hear more about this amazing, positive news? Because it is easier to write other stories.
- Stories about the evil of political propaganda and the social media algorithms that push us toward things that scare us;
- Stories finding the negative exceptions to positive news (murders were up last year in Wake County, where I live; conditions are horrible in Syria, Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, etc.); or
- Stories focusing on indicators other than crime, the economy, or health that aren’t as positive (“hey, let’s talk about war, global warming or the deficit!”), or ones that just remind people that poverty, crime, inequality, disease and child mortality are still too high. There is always a ready supply of bad news.
You’ve been reading and hearing all of those stories, and many of them need to be told. But I hope as this year gets underway that you will also take a moment to appreciate some good news about this world that we live in:
Flawed and imperfect, facing all sorts of challenges, but trending better in more ways than most of us think. Then we can get back to work on making 2024 the best yet.
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