I posted recently about the tendancy for media to give a distorted picture of reality, using examples such as the global warming debate and the MMR vaccine controversy.  I briefly mentioned Chris Anderson’s explanation that media owners are trying to sell stories to us and that we tend to react more to dramatic stories rather than abstract facts.  I am currently reading an excellent book called ‘Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear’ by Dan Gardner which expands on these points and argues that our brains are simply not adapted to cope with the modern media envirmoment.

To put this in context, imagine the whole of human history (roughly 250,000 years) condensed into a single day, starting at midnight.  We spend the vast majority of the day as nomadic hunter gatherers, moving around in small bands of people searching for food.  It is not until 11pm that we even settle down, discover farming and stay in one place.  We develop the earliest forms of writing soon after and by 11:30 we are beginning to congregate into the first towns.  All of the modern communication technologies that we take for granted from printed newspapers, photographs, telecommunications, radio, TV and the internet are all condensed into the last two minutes.

Dan Garder highlights how our hunter gatherer brains often make mistakes in the modern world, particularly with our attitude to risk.  Here are some key points:

Heart rules the Head

We like to think of ourselves as rational thinkers.  However much of our decision making and attitude to risk comes from the unconcious emotional parts of our brains.  For example many people are afraid of snakes.  For someone living on the African savanah this makes sense since snakes live there too and they can kill you.  This fear seems to be hard wired into us since people living in Greenland are also scared of snakes even though most will never come near one.  Experiments by Antonio Damasio on brain damaged patients showed that in people with damage to the emotional centres of the brain have more difficulty in making decisions.  Malcom Gladwell in his book ‘Blink’ shows the importance of gut feel in decision making while Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman highlights in his book ‘How Customer’s Think’ how much of a cutomer’s thoughts and attitudes to a product are governed by their emotions.  This has profound implications for audience based research, since most rearch is conducted using rational questions which rarely tap into what the person really thinks.

Experience teaches a harsh school but fools will learn no other:

Our perceptions of risk can be dramatically molded by our experiences.  On an emotional level, our brains often have difficulty distinguishing between actual experiences and things we experience through the mass media.  Most people know that fact that flying on a plane is safer than driving.  However this didn’t stop many people deciding to drive rather than fly in the wake of 9/11, having been exposed to those dramatic images.  By analysing traffic data in the years before and after 2001, Gerd Gigerenzer a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, was able to calculate that more than 1,500 people were killed as a result of the decision to drive rather than fly.  This is more than half the total death toll of history's worst terrorist activity.

If its natural its good for you:

Perceived risk is also exaggerated by whether it has natural or man-made causes.  For example many people think that the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is greater than the risk of being killed by an asteroid when in fact it is the other way around.  However much more money is spent on anti-terror activities than searching for errant asteroids.  Before the 2004 tsunami, many scientists were calling for an early warning system without much recognition.  As memory of the 230,000 lives killed by the flooding fades, they find themselves facing a similar situation.  Many people feel cuatious about the man-made radiation from nuclear power and yet are very happy to subject themselves to the same ‘natural’ radiation from the sun on their holidays – or course many more people get skin cancer than suffer ill effects from a nuclear power plant.  People are worried about being blown up or murdered but they seem to be happy to live on earthquake fault-lines (California) or on the slopes of active volcanoes (Canary Islands).

If it bleeds it leads:

Speaking of crime, there is often a ‘man-bites-dog’ mentality to the news agenda with unusual stories appearing more often than common ones.  This of course is dangerous because is clouds our view about what is normal.  The media raises the visability of violent crime, particularly towards the elderly and children.  This is despite the fact that violent crime is statistically very unusual and typical victims are young men.  Since a lack of crime does not make good news, many people think that crime if increasing.  In the 2006 British Crime Survey showed that ’63 per cent of people thought that crime in the country as a whole had increased’ depite an actual 44% decline between 1995 and 2005.  Reporting what is interesting rather than what is normal can be seen in other areas such as health.  In 2007 a survey of British women by Oxford University researchers asked ‘at what age a woman is most likely to get breast cancer’.  Most people gave answers much younger that the correct one which was ’80 or older’.  Why was this?  Media analysis from the University of Washington showed that in magazine’s between 1993 and 1997 that 84% of stories of breast cancer sufferers featured people under 50.  A younger sufferer seems more tragic and resonates more, features more in media coverage and hence distorts our perceptions.

GroupThink!

If we have a preconception about something this will act as a filter to the news we read.  Psycologists call this confirmation bias and its something we are all guilty of.  Once a belief is in place, we screen what we see and hear in a biased way that ensures our beliefs are ‘proven’ correct.  An interesting illustration of this can be seen in a subtle twist to the famous ‘Pepsi challenge’.  The Baylor College of Medicine repeated the blind taste test under laboritory conditions with MRI scans to show brain activity.  The results were similar to the adverts with more people preferring the taste of Pepsi.  However when the experiment was repeated with the subjects knowing which brand they were tasting the results were reversed – a preconception of Coke tasting nicer overrode what the tastebuds were saying. 

There is a similar phenomenon called ‘group polarization’.  When people who share beliefs get together in groups they become more convinced that their beliefs are right and they beome more extreme in their views.  Because we feel a strong need to conform the belief can grow rapidly once a critical mass is reached.   

Put all of this together and it can easily be seen how the media can help paint a false picture of reality.  We respond to emotional, personal stories more than impersonal numbers.  As Stalin famously said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”.  Our hunter-gatherer brains are not programmed to understand modern population numbers and the statistics that go with it.  There will always be some people in the world being murdered, abducted and blown up by terrorists and with modern media this will be fed through to the comfort of you living room or your comuter screen in vivid colour and sound.  

People will have preconceptions about things, and will seek out likeminded people only to have these beliefs stregthened.  Strong-willed groups will use media relations and lobbying to get their message across, and can use misleading statistics (which our brains can’t understand) to do so.  There are ever more media outlets and ever fewer journalists to act as a sanity check.  And so the message is more likely to filter into the media and into the minds of the population.  Like a guitar amp feeding back, the whole system reinforces itself.  What is does mean is that PR people are in a stronger position than ever before to affect how people view the world, but as Spiderman said: “with great power comes great responsibility”!