Good news in the world

If you see the news or read the newspaper, bad news prevails. It drives me crazy.

While a lot of positive evolution have happened in the world in recent years and a lot of beautiful things are done every day. That’s why today 365Smiles wants to show a video that highlights the good news!

Nevertheless the fact that news sites report mostly bad news. intrigues me. I did some research and it turns out that this is ingrained in our genes. 

A good news site had a bad experience

A Russian news site CityReporter.ru tried the impossible: a whole day with only good news and optimistic reports. That was big fun,  until they saw the visitor numbers collapse.

We cannot help it

This experiment confirms what numerous psychological studies have already figured out. Man is a slave of his amygdalae (also called ‘almond core’) in our brains. He makes connections between the information coming from our senses and links it to emotions. Two-thirds of the neurons of the amygdala are focused on ‘bad news’ or ‘danger’. That was once essential for survival in nature.

Today we don’t need that mechanism anymore. But our amygdala still pushes us towards negative news. We feel more emotion hearing bad news than good news.

So we are looking for negative messages and news organizations and journalists are of course very happy to help us.

Fortunately a positive evolution is taking place!

An analysis of the ‘share’-behavior on the website of The New York Times led to the conclusion that especially funny and exciting (for example: a big scientific breakthrough) pieces are shared the most. Much more than the daily sadness on that same site.

The explanation there is that we prefer not to present ourselves to our friends, colleagues and family as a grump or a sourpuss. This forces news organizations to revise the balance – ‘the mix’ – in their reporting. Yay!