Doomscrolling. It’s kind of in the name, isn’t it?
“Negativity is one of the prominent qualities of news media.”
That’s the opening line of a new study on doomscrolling, and we at DR have to plead somewhat guilty.
Only somewhat, because we know the stories that make your blood boil are the ones you’ll read most, so we have you, readers, to blame (of the most-viewed stories on our site in the past few months, only about one in 10 could be said to be positive).
Click-driven digital news is probably partially responsible for what these authors say is an overall recent growth in negative compared to positive news. Your Back Page correspondent comes from a more print-dominated news ethos where human editors decided what kind of stories to place – “page 3 needs some light and bright” … “that’s a good change of pace” – instead of letting the numbers make the decisions.
But “if it bleeds, it leads” has always been the news way. Why readers slurp up bad stories and journalists are therefore more inclined to write them and editors to run them is the subject for a-whole-nother story about negativity bias and its adaptive advantages in a dangerous world.
The present study asks whether doomscrolling – compulsively consuming one terrible news story/social media post after another, as facilitated by smartphones – causes psychological harm and existential anxiety.
The Back Page could point out that whoever called it “doomscrolling” was well ahead of you, but we’re a better sport than that.
The authors – an international team including researchers from Australia’s Flinders University as well as the US, Iran, France and Hungary – propose that media has the potential to alter cognition and behaviour. They cite cultivation theory, which says media can change conceptions of social reality, and theories of media violent effects, which hold that aggressive content may trigger real-world hostility.
They cite other work finding that vicarious trauma via the news can produce acute and post-traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety and depression and existential insecurity.
Other prior research has found doomscrolling is predicted by traits such as lower self-control, higher neuroticism, cynicism, generalised anxiety, and that it is associated with more future anxiety, risk-taking, psychological distress (lower well-being, life satisfaction, and harmony in life), fear of missing out, and problematic media use.
So we’re off to a flying start for mental health.
The team surveyed 800 students from the US and Iran, measuring their tendency to doomscroll, their existential anxiety, their belief in a just world and their misanthropy.
The results were a weaker-than-expected confirmation of their hypothesis.
Doomscrolling predicted higher levels of existential anxiety in both samples, with a weak-to-moderate effect. It independently predicted slightly higher levels of misanthropy in the Iranian sample, but “more work” would be needed to establish this in the US sample (which was only a third the size of the Iranian one and skewed female where the Iranian one skewed male).
Contrary to expectation, there was only a slightly negative/nil association between doomscrolling and belief in a just world in the Iranian and US samples respectively.
In associations between the outcome variables, there was a moderate positive association between existential anxiety and misanthropy and between existential anxiety and lowered belief in a just world.
Still, they say, the study “emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the existential and misanthropic aspects of doomscrolling”.
“Social media users need to enhance their awareness of sensations, thoughts, and feelings during social media consumption, and both news media and news consumers must prioritize news which also highlights positive outcomes of negative events,” they conclude.
Look, how about this: we can do our bit to serve you some nicer news, if you promise you’ll read it?
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