Why Doesn't Negative Information Go Viral?

I have always highlighted negative information on DOTE. Sometimes I get hostile e-mails asking me why I don't accentuate the positive. What's wrong with me?

Humans filter or reject negative information, as I first discussed in The Optimist's Brain. And let us not forget in this context that Ignorance Is Bliss. Humans surround themselves with positive information about themselves and their astonishing exploits. Human never tire of basking in their everlasting glory. Humans consider themselves to be the greatest thing the Universe ever produced. Humans think, albeit unconsciously, that the goal of all Creation, starting with the Big Bang, was to create them. I call this The Human Conceit, and I will post about it again before DOTE goes off the air.

Most of this human self-evaluation has nothing to do with Reality, of course, which is why I must present a lot of negative information on DOTE to provide even a tiny semblance of balance in the human view of the natural world and the artificial world they have created. As I once said in another context, the net effect of presenting this negative information is a lot like pissing in the ocean to raise the sea level.

Needless to say, highlighting negative information is not a popular thing to do. Doing so creates no "buzz" on the internet or anywhere else. Things I write about on DOTE—for example, the coming mass extinction in the oceans—never go viral. I should add that when I say "negative information," I am not talking about train wrecks, celebrity murders, plane crashes, or Justin Bieber peeing in a mopbucket.

What kind of stuff does create a lot of buzz? And why?

Brain scientists at UCLA think they have part of the answer. Science Daily reported on the new study in How the Brain Creates the 'Buzz' That Helps Ideas Spread.

How do ideas spread? What messages will go viral on social media, and can this be predicted?

UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."

The research has a broad range of implications, the study authors say, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students.

"Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people," said the study's senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and author of the forthcoming book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect.

"We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that. At the first encounter with information, people are already using the brain network involved in thinking about how this can be interesting to other people. We're wired to want to share information with other people. I think that is a profound statement about the social nature of our minds."

Lieberman thinks he's stumbled upon a profound result about the social nature of the human mind.

So do I.

I am going to leave out the details about how the study was conducted. Read the Science Daily article for details. Let's zero in on the data and conclusions.

"We're constantly being exposed to information on Facebook, Twitter and so on," said Lieberman. "Some of it we pass on, and a lot of it we don't."

"Is there something that happens in the moment we first see it — maybe before we even realize we might pass it on — that is different for those things that we will pass on successfully versus those that we won't?"

It turns out, there is. The psychologists found that the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend. [image above]

They had more activation in this region than the interns who were less persuasive and more activation than they themselves had when exposed to pilot ideas they didn't like. The psychologists call this the "salesperson effect."

"It was the only region in the brain that showed this effect," Lieberman said. One might have thought brain regions associated with memory would show more activation, but that was not the case, he said.

Here's the key text.

"We wanted to explore what differentiates ideas that bomb from ideas that go viral," Falk said.

"We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas. Nobody had looked before at which brain regions are associated with the successful spread of ideas. You might expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated about ideas that they themselves are excited about, but our research suggests that's not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important"...

The story here is that ideas go viral because the human brain is wired for (attracted to) ideas which will appeal to others in whatever social group we're talking about. That in itself is what makes an idea popular, and perhaps largely determines whether an idea is "good" or "bad" in the judgement of the human evaluator. The study authors call this the "salesperson effect." The effect is stronger in some people than it is in others.

All this makes sense to me. Clearly, whether an idea is "good" or "bad" with respect to some objective standard we might call Reality has nothing to do with the popularity of the idea. In fact, most of the ideas that may go viral are fantasies, as in this study (see the Science Daily article). Humans love Fantasy.

Now, consider this finding in the context of what I said in the introduction to this post. There are clear constraints on which ideas will fly and which won't. If you wanted to truly understand the human monkey, you would have figure out why positive ideas and attractive fantasies make the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) light up like a Christmas tree, and why negative ideas and reality go over like a lead balloon.

That's the experiment I want to see, but I doubt we'll ever see it. My answer of course has to do with innate Optimism and the Human Conceit which I briefly described above.

But there is a larger take-home lesson here. The brains of these human monkeys are basically all structured in the same way. (There are several thousand exceptions among the 7 billion humans on Earth. These relatively few exceptions only serve to prove the rule.) And the fact that human brains are all wired the same way is what I refer to as Human Nature on DOTE.

Without a "good-enough" theory of Human Nature, there is no hope whatsover of explaining, for example, why humans are destroying the biosphere and can't stop themselves from doing it. I will present my views of Human Nature before DOTE goes off the air on July 26, 2013.

 

Comments

[Dopamine]

Human brains are very associative. Always bringing bad news will make the amygdala resonate and incorporate your likeness into a black neural net of bad feelings. But if you have good news, no matter how fantastic, spread it widely, you will be part of a white and shiny neural network reinforced with dopamine. Your friends and associates will think good of you, as positive and upbeat, even though you are a liar. Amygdala tickler be shunned, dopamine injector is welcome any time.