Doom Scrolling: The Evolution of Negativity Biases

Are you drawn to the endless news cycle? Do you keep going back for more? Do you feel a strange compulsion to absorb negative news that is weirdly soothing but makes you more stressed? These are signs you may be doomscrolling. But fear not, you’re not the only one. Stuart Soroka is a professor at UCLA who’s been looking at our draw towards negative information and found that people all over the world do it, regardless of culture. In 2020, our year of misery, the Oxford English Dictionary added doomscrolling and named it a word of the year. With the help of Stuart and Radio and TV presenter Clara Amfo, Ella gets to the bottom of whether we humans really are more biased towards negative information, and what we can do to resist it.