Why are newspapers and TV broadcasts filled with disaster, corruption and incompetence? It may be because we're drawn to depressing stories without realizing, according to psychologists. When you read the news, sometimes it can feel like the only things reported are terrible, depressing events. Why do the media concentrate on the bad things in life, rather than the good? In fact, many people often say that they would prefer good news. The researchers present their experiment as solid evidence of a so called "negativity bias ", psychologists' term for our collective hunger to hear, and remember bad news. It isn't just delight in other people's misfortune, the theory goes, but that we've evolved to react quickly to potential threats. Bad news could be a signal that we need to change what we're doing to avoid danger. As you'd expect from this theory, there's some evidence that people respond quicker to negative words. In lab experiments, flash the word "cancer", "bomb" or "war" up at someone and they can hit a button in response quicker than if that word is "baby", "smile" or "fun". We are also able to recognize negative words faster than positive words, and even tell that a word is going to be unpleasant before we can tell exactly what the word is going to be. There's another interpretation  that researchers put on their evidence: we pay attention to bad news, because on the whole, we think the world is more hopeful than it actually is. When it comes to our own lives, most of us believe we're better than average, and that, like the cliches, we expect things to be all right in the end. This pleasant view of the world makes bad news all the more surprising and arresting. It is only against a light background that the dark spots are highlighted. So our attraction to bad news may be more complex than just journalistic prejudice or a hunger springing from the darkness within. What causes people to focus more on bad news than on good news?
The world is believed to be more hopeful than it actually is. It is expected things will be all right in the end. The world is believed to be full of darkness. It is believed that we are better than others.