If the many Reels are to be believed, we’ve been wearing earphones wrong, brushing our teeth wrong, peeling off post-its incorrectly. There’s a better way to use a juice carton and apply sunscreen, do the breaststroke and hold one’s phone.
In real life, we’d sever all ties with someone who went on at us in this manner. Yet, online, we can’t seem to look away.
Knowingly and unknowingly social media content creators are tapping into an evolutionary trait called negativity bias. Humans are more intensely drawn to signals that indicate one is in the midst of a misstep.
A spiky plant, a stinging ant mound, a growl from a predator’s lair, became the kinds of signals that registered more intensely in the brain, activating more neural networks, studies have shown, because these stimuli were linked to behaviour that had to be remembered or altered, as our weak and uniquely disadvantaged species battled to survive. The positive signals of everyday life, by comparison, formed a sort of white noise; calming in a vital way, but unremarkable, unmemorable. “We feel pain, but not painlessness,” as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it.
Today, the physical stings, barbs and growls that might have once registered as negative input have been replaced by experiences such as failure, embarrassments, insults from others. These memories tend to linger and resurface.
The term for this, “negativity bias”, was coined by psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman in a 2001 paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, which outlined how negative signals and stimuli tended to embed themselves deeper and spread more widely and quickly than positive ones.
This trait is visible even in one-year-olds. Researchers at the University of California tested 55 infants for attention spikes, and reported increased brain activity in response to negative emotions such as disgust. (Their findings were published in the journal Development Psychology in 2007.)
When they say that the endless doomscrolling comes from negativity bias, this is what they mean. As we scan our customised reams of bad news, deep down the brain is still hoping it will learn something that will help it survive.
Social media has caught on to this effect, resulting in the millions of clickbait posts and videos that admonish the viewer.
Any video with “How to” “Don’t do this” or “Did you know” in the title are essentially designed to stop the human brain in its tracks, even if the rest of that sentence has no bearing on one’s life (You know what we mean – “How to fold a stroller correctly” when you don’t even have a baby?).
They’re coming at us from life coaches (“Stop saying this to yourself”, “Stop making these six body language mistakes”), finfluencers (“Don’t take out a loan without reading this caption”), beauty influencers (“Stop doing this if you want long hair”) and momfluencers (“Which mistakes are we making?”).
Can some of these contain real tips? Sure. As always, offline consultations with an expert are a better bet, but we’re all learning from the internet. It just needn’t be in a way that is so fraught.
So the next time a video or reel insists you stop what you’re doing, because you’re doing everything wrong, remember, you do not really need to know how to knot a tie in that many ways. It’s just an ancient instinct honed over millions of years, insisting that you do.
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