Why are we humans so susceptible to the doom and gloom of the news? Two reasons.

The first is what psychologists call negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened of a spider or a snake a hundred times too often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too little surely would.

Second, we’re also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common. The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft disasters, child snatchers and beheadings — which tend to lodge in the memory — completely skews our view of the world.

In this digital age, the news we’re being fed is only getting more extreme. In the old days, journalists didn’t know much about their individual readers. They wrote for the masses. But the people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google know you well. They know what shocks and horrifies you, they know what makes you click. They know how to grab your attention and hold it so they can serve you the most lucrative helping of personalised ads. This modern media frenzy is nothing less than an assault on the mundane. Because, let’s be honest, the lives of most people are pretty predictable. Nice, but boring. So while we’d prefer having nice neighbours with boring lives, ‘boring’ won’t make you sit up and take notice. ‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads. And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021.]

The author’s statements about negativity bias, if true, provide most support for which of the following conclusions?

The correct answer is: We are more likely to notice a story about increasing pollution levels than a story about improving educational levels in schools.

Step-by-Step Explanation:

1. Understand the passage's definition of "negativity bias":

According to the second paragraph of the passage, negativity bias is defined as our psychological tendency where "we’re more attuned to the bad than the good." This evolutionary trait means humans naturally pay more attention to negative, threatening, or harmful information than to positive, optimistic news.

2. Analyze the Options:

We need to find an option that illustrates being more attuned/attracted to "bad news" (negative information) than to "good news" (positive information):

• Option 1: "We are more likely to notice a story about a billionaire donating their money to charity than a story about an airplane crash."
This option claims we pay more attention to good news (charity donation) over bad news (airplane crash), which contradicts negativity bias.

• Option 2: "We are more likely to be attracted to a news article about a rise in life expectancy in our country than a news article about a murder in our city."
This option claims we prefer positive news (rise in life expectancy) over negative news (a murder), which also contradicts negativity bias.

• Option 3: "We are more likely to notice a story about increasing pollution levels than a story about improving educational levels in schools."
Increasing pollution levels is negative/bad news, whereas improving educational levels is positive/good news. Negativity bias supports the conclusion that people will pay more attention to the bad news (increasing pollution) than the good news (educational improvements).

• Option 4: "We are more likely to form our opinion of the world based on the information available to us rather than information we do not have access to."
This statement relates to availability bias (discussed in paragraph 3), not negativity bias.

Conclusion:

Option 3 directly aligns with the concept of negativity bias by demonstrating our tendency to focus more on negative events than positive ones.