Less is More

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many years ago, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was on the chopping block. President Richard Nixon wanted to radically slash its proposed budget. Supporters of CPB, as it's known, took that case to a Congressional hearing.

They argued that $20 million was a small amount to pay for the many educational and entertainment television programs that the public broadcaster will generate.

In hour after hour of testimony, advocates argued that funding public broadcasting was good for America and good for America's children.

The Head of the Congressional Committee, Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, had a reputation for being tough-minded and impatient.

Sen. John Pastore:

All right, now when you answer my question, had you not done this...

Shankar Vedantam:

After a deluge of data and declarations had been presented to his committee, a famous children's television host took the stage. His name was Fred Rogers.

Sen. John Pastore:

All right, Rogers, you've got the floor.

Shankar Vedantam:

He talked about what his program meant to America's children.

Fred Rogers:

I end the program by saying, you've made this day a special day by just you being you.

Shankar Vedantam:

The children's television host asked the senator if he could recite the words to a song from his program. It was about self-esteem, self-control, and emotional regulation.

Fred Rogers:

"I can stop when I want to, can stop when I wish, can stop, stop, stop, anytime. And what a good feeling to feel like this, and know that the feeling is really mine, know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can."

Sen. John Pastore:

I think it's wonderful, I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million.

Shankar Vedantam:

All of us, in every walk of life, at every stage of life, need buy-in from others. Sometimes you need legislators to fund your project. Other times you might need your coworkers to sign on to a new initiative, or you might need to convince your teacher to change your grade on an assignment. This week on Hidden Brain, the common mistake we make that undermines the effectiveness of our pleas, and how to make better arguments that stick.

Think about a time when you tried to change someone's mind. Maybe you were convincing your boss to give you a promotion, or explaining to a friend why she should vote for a particular politician. Did you give much thought to the way you are crafting your argument? Did you think about the phrases you would use, the evidence you would present? At London Business School, Niro Sivanathan studies the psychology of the arguments we make. Niro Sivanathan, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Niro Sivanathan:

Hi, Shankar. Wonderful to be here.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro, I understand that when you were a kid, you were an avid video gamer. What games were you fascinated by?

Niro Sivanathan:

I think I played anything and everything I could get my hands on. I think, as a typical 10-year-old, I spent far too much time in front of the TV back then, and not necessarily screens, but TV, playing, I think I had a Nintendo 16 and a Sega Genesis, I think. I'm dating myself, but those were the systems I grew up on.

Shankar Vedantam:

Like many kids who are into video games, Niro had to battle a couple of really big obstacles, his mom and his dad.

Niro Sivanathan:

I think there was always a constant battle and a wrestling of arguments with my parents for when I got to play, how often, and for the duration. So, yes, there were typical battles with parents.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro tried to come up with every possible reason he should be allowed to play more video games. One time he even turned an assignment in French class into an argument about the benefits of a particular video game.

Niro Sivanathan:

So, in Canada you are required to take French till grade nine, and that's across the entire education system. There were lots of things I could do well, Shankar, but learning language was not one of them, and so I did pretty well, generally, in school, but did not do so well in French, and specifically vocabulary. So, one year, I think I had an assignment for my French class, and I decided I would write about the benefits of playing video games.

I thought through this, and then had the usual arguments that it would help me with eye-hand coordination, problem-solving, thinking outside the box, et cetera. But the thesis of that essay was that it was also crucial in my ability to learn French, and specifically remember words and increase my vocabulary.

And not surprisingly, I didn't do so well on that essay, but this was also something that was shared with my parents. Needless to say, that didn't necessarily help me at home with my battles for playing more video games.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, in other words, the argument you were making to your parents was, video games not only help me with hand-eye coordination and are a form of entertainment, but they're also going to help me master this difficult language that I'm not doing well at school in?

Niro Sivanathan:

That's right. So, I think the game that I was probably referring to was, I think, Zelda or the Legend of Zelda, I forget what the exact title was, where there were all sorts of foreign words. And my argument was that if I could remember these foreign words that are nonsensical, certainly, French words, which were equally nonsensical to me, would be a breeze. That, as you can imagine from your laughter, it didn't go so well. I think when I was drafting the essay, it seemed to make perfect sense, but unfortunately that didn't land so well.

Shankar Vedantam:

It was not the last time Niro would find his arguments falling short. Much later in life, after he became a professor, he found himself advocating that a particular student be admitted into the school's PhD program.

Niro Sivanathan:

There was one applicant that I was incredibly passionate about, I thought had great potential, they had phenomenal research experience. So, had publication already in a top tier journal even before they started the PhD program, which back then was pretty rare. Their grades were good but not great, and perhaps their pedigree for the university wasn't necessarily top shelf, but needless to say, was respectable.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro thought the student was a perfect fit for the program. When it came time to present him to the application committee, Niro did his best to note his strengths, namely, his research experience. But Niro also tried to justify why the student’s grades were not stellar.

Niro Sivanathan:

I highlighted that the undergrad was in a more difficult subject than what we typically get in our applicant pool, and so forth. That then resulted in a conversation which centered around the grades and whether this person would be a good fit, and very quickly deviated from the type of conversation that I had forecasted or hoped for. And unfortunately, this candidate was not accepted into the program.

This individual went on to get accepted into a wonderful institution, and is now one of the most prominent young academics in the field. It's one of those cases where I wish I did a better job sponsoring and promoting that individual to the committee.

Shankar Vedantam:

You can probably remember moments like this when you tried and failed to make your case effectively. Maybe you lost an argument with your spouse over how to parent your child, or you failed to persuade your boss to start a new project. Of course, failures of persuasion can also happen on a much larger scale. Niro has examined a case from the early 1980s when a new illness called AIDS was ravaging communities across the United States. In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a meeting on the crisis. Officials from the CDC took a stance that they thought would help slow the spread of the disease.

Niro Sivanathan:

The CDC, for months, had collected copious amounts of data that allowed them to come to the conclusion that HIV was related to AIDS, and that it could also be transmitted through plasma, or specifically, blood. And this was an open meeting to the various stakeholders, and I think the core stakeholders that they cared about was, I think it was the American Red Cross, the AABB, which I think was the American Association of Blood Banks, along with many other stakeholders.

And their hope was to present all this data as a way to convince them that, moving forward, they should screen for HIV when they take blood donations. And the hope was that once this data was presented, it would be very clear, and there would be a set of protocols or structures that we put in place for both blood donations, and obviously, then the transmission of blood for those who might need a blood transfusion.

Shankar Vedantam:

Obviously, here, there are public health stakes because the blood transfusions are now going into other patients, for example, in hospitals. And if the AIDS virus was in the blood, you could potentially infect somebody who was healthy.

Niro Sivanathan:

That's right. So, we've had other health epidemics since then. This, back in the '80s, was front and center, and there was a huge push, both, as you said, at the policy level but elsewhere to try and curtail the spread. And unfortunately, the meeting didn't go as planned where lots of questions were posed through multiple avenues around the legitimacy of the data, the recommendations by CDC, and so forth. And frankly, nothing came out of that meeting, and most certainly a far cry from what they were hoping for, which was the screening of HIV.

Now, some estimates suggest that as a failure of that meeting, an additional 12,000 people were either infected or died from tainted blood transfusions. So, the stakes were very high, the data was crystal clear. Unfortunately, the presentation of that data didn't necessarily have the outcome the CDC were hoping for.

Shankar Vedantam:

We've seen different examples of arguments falling short. Niro failed to convince his parents about video games, and he failed to convince the PhD committee about the student. The CDC failed to persuade the blood banks to start screening for the AIDS virus. When we come back, the common mistake that undermines the effectiveness of our arguments, and how to get our ideas to land better. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Niro Sivanathan studies organizational behavior at London Business School. In recent years, he has become fascinated by the way we make arguments, and the errors we make in choosing the most effective arguments.

So, we've seen a number of examples here, Niro. Somewhere, people are trying to convince someone else of something they probably shouldn't be convincing someone else of, having your parents allow you to play more video games, or trying to convince someone about something that's important, getting the PhD student admitted into the program, or for the CDC, getting the blood bank organizations to think about the transmission of HIV through the blood supply.

You say that there is a common mistake in many of these examples that we are seeing, and you call this mistake the dilution effect. What is this, Niro?

Niro Sivanathan:

The dilution effect, or what's commonly referred to as the argument dilution effect, is broadly a phenomenon, Shankar, which is where, whenever making an argument or whenever trying to articulate a point, oftentimes people give supporting arguments. And whenever you add in weak arguments, it dilutes away from your very strong argument.

Shankar Vedantam:

Put another way, when you add extraneous information to your central point, the extra stuff isn't just fluff that gets ignored by the person you are trying to convince. The extra stuff actually undermines the point you are trying to make. In fact, even when a piece of information is not extraneous but just slightly off the mark, it has the effect of undermining the strongest portion of your argument. Niro says, one place this happens is when lawyers present eyewitness testimony in court.

Niro Sivanathan:

So, this was a study that was done several years ago where, imagine a scenario, Shankar, where you are the prosecution, you've got a couple of choices to make, you've got a very good eyewitness who saw the suspect and has a very clear account of what they saw, and you have another eyewitness testimony from another individual who saw the individual, didn't get a clear image of this person, but certainly, the elements that they saw fit the description of the suspect.

Now, the typical calculus that someone might make is to think, look, I've got one very strong eyewitness, but I also have a second eyewitness that sort of corroborates it, although they have some doubt. It turns out that presenting both of those eyewitnesses in support of the prosecution dilutes the overall strength, even though, as a forecast, you might believe, look, I have got two eyewitnesses, when in fact the weaker eyewitness dilutes the overall strength, if you will, of the argument made by the prosecution.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro, in general, if something is good, more of it is better. So, getting free lunch for a month is better than getting free lunches for a week, making more money feels better than making less. So, when it comes to persuading other people, we gravitate quite naturally to the same logic. If one piece of evidence is persuasive, surely 10 pieces of evidence should be even more convincing. Why would this not be the case?

Niro Sivanathan:

That's a great question, Shankar. And I think this is a forecasting error that we make when we communicate, perhaps extrapolating from that very logic, more money is better than less, more free cups of coffee is better than less. In the world of influence, and more specifically, communicating for the purpose of influence, that logic or that calculus is an erroneous one to subscribe to.

Shankar Vedantam:

To demonstrate this idea, Niro asked me to think about how to make an effective argument. Let's say you want to convince someone that the French soccer star, Kylian Mbappé is the best soccer player in the world.

Niro Sivanathan:

And let's assume you've come up with four reasons or four arguments for why Mbappé is the best football player. Let's assume of these four arguments you've come up with, two of them are very strong, and they're worth, let's say, 90 points out of a hundred in terms of argument strength. So, these are incredibly strong arguments, and they're worth 90 points out of a 100.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, let's say Mbappé has scored many goals, for example, or he has much more consistent in the way he scores goals, those could be very strong arguments to make the case that he's the best soccer player in the world?

Niro Sivanathan:

Indeed. And let's assume you've come up with two additional arguments that are very good, but not as strong as the first two, and only worth 60 points out of a 100. And these could be such things as he plays for the very best team in France, he's signed a great contract, and so forth.

The calculus that most communicators make, and previewed by your earlier comment, is to think, look, I've got four great arguments. Granted, two of them are very strong, but the other two are still strong. Let me put it all on the table as a way to convince Niro that Mbappé is the best football player.

The calculus that you're making, Shankar, is that the strength of that argument is 300 points; 90 + 90 + 60 + 60. Turns out, however, receivers of information don't engage in an additive function, they engage in an averaging function.

Shankar Vedantam:

An averaging function. The two weaker arguments are not piling on top of the stronger arguments to make a taller tower. Instead, the weaker arguments are undermining the stronger ones. If you're keeping track of the math, we have four arguments that are collectively worth 300 points. That means the average score across the four arguments is 75 points.

Niro Sivanathan:

Now, if you want to be more persuasive and more influential, you would have been far better off to say, "Niro, Mbappé is the very best football player in the world because of reason one, reason two," stop. Now, I hear 90 plus 90 adds up to 180, divided by two. The strength of that argument is 90 points, not 75. In the world of influence, unlike free coffees, et cetera, is that the strength of any argument that you make is only as strong, if you will, as your weakest link.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is what happened when Niro was advocating for the PhD candidate. He would likely have been better off if he had simply said, "This candidate has off-the-wall talent in terms of research. No one else comes even close." Instead, in trying to anticipate potential lines of criticism from other committee members, Niro, in supporting arguments about how the candidate's weaker grades were not that important, and that they involved more difficult courses. The committee's discussion soon focused on the weaker grades instead of the stellar research.

Like all psychological phenomena, the argument dilution effect can have good consequences and bad consequences. It can keep a bad politician from implementing bad policies, or it can lull people into a false sense of security. Think about the pharmaceutical ads that are ubiquitous on American television.

Niro Sivanathan:

And the typical architecture of these ads is, you'll see a happy couple dancing and prancing through their back garden or the park because for the first time in months they were able to get a full night's sleep. But because of FDA regulations that were passed down about 20, 20-plus years ago, the last 30 seconds of that one-minute ad needs to be devoted to the side effects of that drug.

So, what you'll typically hear is a hurried voiceover that says, "Side effects include heart attack, stroke," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and will end with something like, "Itchy feet." Guess what itchy feet does to the average consumer's evaluation of the risk associated with that drug.

Shankar Vedantam:

Am I now averaging out strokes and heart disease and itchy feet and putting them all together in the same bucket in my mind?

Niro Sivanathan:

That is correct. The itchy feet dilutes people's overall risk assessment of heart attack. Imagine an alternate commercial, Shankar, which, it says, "This drug cures your sleep problems. Side effects are heart attack and stroke." Now, all of a sudden you're thinking, "I don't mind staying up the rest of my life." It turns out this FDA regulation, which was done for very noble reasons, which is they wanted pharmaceutical companies to be transparent with both the benefits, but also the cost.

But it turns out listing a shopping list of side effects, both major side effects such as heart attack and stroke, coupled with some minor side effects such as itchy feet, long toenails, et cetera, dilutes people's overall risk assessment of that drug. Now, you'll notice here, Shankar, this isn't non-diagnostic information. It is simply that even weak diagnostic information dilutes people's overall evaluation.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro wanted to take a deeper look at this phenomenon. He ran a series of studies in which he tried to mimic a typical pharmaceutical ad. In one study, Niro and his team showed people a full list of side effects for a sleep drug. In another, esteem removed three of the weakest side effects from the ad. In other words, volunteers were only shown the major side effects.

Niro Sivanathan:

And what we find is that individuals who were exposed just to the major side effects rather than the complete list of side effects evaluated the severity of the side effects, overall severity, to be much lower. When they saw the full list of side effects, they rated the drug to be more effective, and even in one study, were willing to pay more for that drug than the version that only listed the major side effects.

Shankar Vedantam:

I was called for jury duty a couple of weeks ago, and I went there but I was not selected. And I was at the courthouse and didn't have very much on my calendar that morning, so I decided to stop by a murder trial for a couple of hours. And I noticed something very interesting, which is, as the prosecutor was making her case, it seemed like a very compelling case, that the circumstantial evidence was very strong, the video footage was very strong, and I was like, "The prosecutor is probably right."

Then, the defense counsel started speaking, and one of the things he did was he just added a lot more detail to what was going on, just a lot more information. And the more detail he added, the weaker the prosecutor's arguments seemed to become. So, it's almost a variation of what you're talking about, which is that when we have a large volume of information coming at us, our minds somehow tend to average out that information rather than looking at only the most salient pieces of information.

Niro Sivanathan:

That's right. We've talked about how to be more persuasive and more influential. So, one of the errors that individuals often make is to list a shopping list of benefits for why Mbappé is the best player or a founder might list all the benefits of his new startup over what's currently on the market. But in lots of settings, Shankar, you also need to highlight both the pros but also the cons.

And a nefarious takeaway from this or a way to abuse this is, one way in which to get individuals not to focus on the negatives is to dilute it with a lot of trivial negative elements with that product. So, you could imagine a financial product. In fact, this didn't make it into our study, but we did run this where we provided a financial instrument or financial product.

And in one we listed some of the major risk factors associated with this product, and others we listed both the major but also some of the minor risk factors. And when you list the minor risk factors, people rate that financial product to be less risky, not more risky, and willing to consume that product, all as a result of the dilution effect.

Shankar Vedantam:

I asked Niro why the dilution effect occurs. Was it simply a matter of being inundated with too much information? Multiple strands of social science research have shown that humans are so-called cognitive misers. We constantly seek to simplify the amount of thinking we have to do. Give us lots of different points, and instead of carefully tallying up the sum, we simply generate a rough average of all the points. Niro said that while that hypothesis was plausible, the data did not support it.

Niro Sivanathan:

We, in fact, ran several studies where we limited the amount of information people were exposed to. So, in fact, we listed just the major side effects and just the minor side effects, as well as the complete side effects. And what you see is that, counter to a information overload account, what you find is that, controlling for the amount of information one is asked to process when individuals are given both major and minor, people rate that drug to be less risky and less severity in its side effects than information, which is just the major side effects or just the minor side effects.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, this is fascinating, because I think what I'm hearing you say is that, in some ways there are two problems, but they might also be related problems. The first problem is just the volume of information that's coming at us can be so great that we can basically shut down and say, "I can't take in any more information," which is your standard information overload argument.

But there's a second argument, which I think is in some ways a more subtle and insidious form of this problem, which is that the volume of information coming at me is not overwhelming, but the information is of varying quality, and my mind is not very good at assigning different weights to the different qualities of information coming in, and so I do the cognitively simpler thing of actually averaging out everything and assuming everything is the same, instead of doing the more cognitively difficult thing of saying, "this piece of information is worth a lot more than this other piece of information." Does that sound fair?

Niro Sivanathan:

That is correct. And if there are steps that could be done to recategorize them, and that somehow, in my mind, I say, this is a different category of information than this, again, the dilution effect occurs, but the weight has been shifted as a result of increasing focus or creating a distinction between these two categories of information.

So, I'll give you an example of this, Shankar. So, in the pharmaceutical ads, one of the things we did in one of the studies is, we took the major side effects, we put that in red font and bold, and the minor side effects, we left it in black ink and regular font.

Shankar Vedantam:

In other words, Niro and his team gave volunteers the same volume of information about side effects, but for one group, they made the major side effects pop out. Volunteers were being told, "Pay more attention to these side effects."

Niro Sivanathan:

So, we haven't changed the content or the data, but by simply doing that, what we see is that consumers, or in this case, our participants, still engaged in the averaging effect, but the impact of that averaging effect is now reduced as a result. And there's still a dilution, but I've now given greater weight to the first two, less weight to the second two, and as a result, the overall impact of that message is closer to the outcome you're hoping for. And again, you're not overcoming the averaging effect, you're just helping reduce its impact.

Shankar Vedantam:

In 1969, Fred Rogers testified before Congress to secure more funding for public broadcasting. Niro, I understand that you teach about Mr. Rogers’ testimony in your class. Give me the context of that event and what happened next.

Niro Sivanathan:

Yeah. So, this was a testimony in front of Congress. Various individuals had presented copious amounts of data for why it should not be funded, lots of testimonies, et cetera. And what you hear there is Fred Rogers moves away from a shopping list of reasons or data points for why PBS should be funded. Fred Rogers does multiple things during that testimony that is really a masterclass on communicating for the purpose of influence.

He has one key argument, a pretty potent one, and one that very clearly pulls on the heartstrings, and he does not deviate from it. He could have come up with 10 other things that kids benefit from his programming. He sticks to a very core element and provides one vivid example of that main point, and the rest is history, as they say.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro says he has been on a mission to make people aware of the argument dilution effect. But as a parent himself, there are also times where the dilution effect helps him see through a weak case. Some time ago, Niro's son made the argument that he needed to stay home from school one day.

Niro Sivanathan:

I think this was about a year ago, my son woke up and had complained that he wasn't feeling well and needed to stay home. And as with any parent, you're obviously concerned that they're okay. So, once we've had that initial discussion, asked him to explain what his symptoms were, which started with, "I'm not feeling well. My tummy isn't feeling well. I think I also have a bit of a headache. I also feel like I'm getting a little bit of fever."

That was then followed with, "I think my leg is hurting a little bit," to, "I'm also having some blurred vision," and a whole lot of other symptoms, which suggests that... One would've thought my son had Ebola, but certainly he didn't. But he listed off a string of symptoms that he was experiencing or felt like he was a bad experience.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, he presented the case that he was close to death's door, basically?

Niro Sivanathan:

Pretty much, yeah. So, I think death was knocking at his bedroom door, and just a day of staying home would help overcome these numerous symptoms.

Shankar Vedantam:

Niro did what his parents had done to him when he tried to make the case that playing video games would help him to learn French, he didn't buy it. When we come back, we look at the challenges of communication, not from the point of view of the communicator, but the point of view of the audience. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We live in extraordinary times. Information is more accessible than it's ever been at any point in human history. If you want to know the current temperature in a city halfway around the planet, you can find out with a quick Google search. If you're curious about the name of a star you're watching in the night sky, an app can tell you what it is.

But the easy and endless availability of information is not always a blessing. Bryan McLaughlin remembers getting obsessed with information during the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States. Every minor change in the polls, every statement and counter statement between candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, became cause for sleepless nights.

Bryan McLaughlin:

For me, a lot of it was Twitter. And I ended up just on my phone all the time for a few months leading up to the election, just trying to get new tidbits of information and just always finding myself just hooked into it, thinking about it all the time, having trouble sleeping, just definitely stressed and anxious about things, just following every move in terms of what the candidates were saying, how it's being received, things of that nature.

Shankar Vedantam:

And why do you think you were doing that? What were you aiming to get out of it?

Bryan McLaughlin:

I was aiming to ease my anxiety about the potential outcome. I was just pretty concerned about how things could go, and I was anxious about it, and I wanted to find information that would maybe make me feel a bit better about it.

Shankar Vedantam:

But the information Bryan sought did not soothe his anxiety. His obsession with the news cycle started to affect his personal life.

Bryan McLaughlin:

I recall just a time ago, I'm on the floor in my kid's room, I should be playing with him, he's trying to get my attention and I'm just on my phone checking Twitter, having a hard time putting it down. And I realized that I'm really disconnected here, that I'm not paying attention to my son, not playing with him. I'm trying to sneak in this time, and it's really being disruptive.

Shankar Vedantam:

Bryan would interrupt conversations with his wife to check the news.

Bryan McLaughlin:

And she would be like, "Seriously? Like I'm literally talking to you right now and you're gonna get on your phone?" But I had a hard time helping it. It just became so second nature that I wouldn't even think about it, I would just, out of habit, pull up my phone just to check.

Shankar Vedantam:

Tell me what effect this had on your physical and mental health, this obsession with Twitter and what was happening with the election.

Bryan McLaughlin:

I definitely started off with a lot of sleep issues, just waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go to bed. I remember laying down in bed and just noticing how tense my body was, how clenched up my muscles were, just feeling a lot of physical stress. I developed back pain, and I had it for months after that where I just, every day, dealt with back pain.

Shankar Vedantam:

As a communications researcher at Texas Tech University, Bryan got curious about whether his experience was idiosyncratic. In 2021, he and his colleagues conducted a study asking people about their news habits. They discovered multiple factors that characterize what he calls "harmful news consumption".

Bryan McLaughlin:

Yeah. So, me and my co-authors, Melissa Gottlieb and Devon Mills, we developed this idea of problematic news consumption, which is similar to this idea of news addiction, but we don't think it's technically an addiction. Then, we did a survey with over, I think 1,100 US adults, and we looked at their overall news use.

But then we developed these different components of problematic news consumption, which include transportation, the extent to which they're drawn into the news, preoccupation, the extent to which they're thinking about it all the time, so even after news stop consuming the news, they just can't stop thinking about it, misregulation, which is the idea that people keep going back to the news thinking it might make them feel better even though, ultimately, it doesn't, under-regulation, which is the inability to stop, they just need to do it all the time, and then, interference, the extent of which it starts bleeding into and affecting other aspects of your life, like spending time with family, paying attention to work.

So, we looked at these components, we found they all worked together as a cohesive concept, problematic news consumption, and we looked at that in the relationship to mental and physical health while also controlling for things like overall news use. And we found a very strong relationship between those who had the highest levels of problematic news consumption and worse mental and physical health.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, one of the striking things in your study is that you found that nearly half the people in your sample, I think it was about 43%, had symptoms that were either what you call moderately problematic or severely problematic. That's astonishing, Bryan.

Bryan McLaughlin:

It was definitely higher than we expected, and part of it might have just been timing. We did this right after the election, still during the midst of the pandemic, so maybe people were a bit more tuned in and stressed out than normal. But still, it is a pretty wide phenomenon. And almost without fail, if somebody says, "Oh, that's just like my aunt, or, "I can identify with that." So, the percentages are definitely higher than we expected, but also, I think that we see a lot of anecdotal evidence of this as well.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, the most disturbing aspect of what you found, of course, was the connections between people who are absorbing excessive amounts of the news and their physical and mental wellbeing. What kind of symptoms were people reporting, Bryan?

Bryan McLaughlin:

So, for mental wellbeing, we were looking at anxiety and stress, how frequently do you experience things like panic, feeling stressed out. So, there were higher levels of generalized stress and anxiety in terms of mental wellbeing. For physical wellbeing we looked at things like headaches, GI issues, back pain, neck pain, and so we collapsed those just overall incidents of physical wellbeing.

Shankar Vedantam:

I think it's remarkable that you're finding that there's a connection between over-consumption of news and these physical and mental symptoms. Reading the newspaper or watching cable television is not getting exposed to COVID. It's not a pathogen, but it seems to be having effects on our health very much like a pathogen.

Bryan McLaughlin:

There's a good example in nature, like gazelles, when they see a lion, everything shoots up, they're runaway, everything's on high alert. Then, once they're safe, everything goes back to normal and they continue grazing and it's like nothing ever happened. So, in that case, the physiological reaction is helpful. It helps you do what you need, then you can go back to your life.

People who are sucked in the news though and they can't stop thinking about it, it never goes down, because you're just always thinking about it. Either we're reading it or we're watching it, or we're just thinking about it. And if we have a high level of perceived threat, if we're very anxious, if our cortisol is high, we can suffer inflammation, and that can really take a toll on our bodies.

Shankar Vedantam:

I love the analogy, because imagine now that that gazelle is basically being exposed to the lion 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Bryan McLaughlin:

Right. You can't function like that. If you're just constantly seeing a lion, then you can't ever relax, and then it's just never-ending.

Shankar Vedantam:

It does seem though, that's problematic. It seems problematic to be telling people the right approach is to tell people to switch off from the news because clearly the news is telling you things that are important. So, if the gazelle that watches the lion 16 hours a day, seven days a week, that's not going to be a healthy gazelle. The gazelle that basically says, "I'm never going to pay attention to the lion," is a gazelle that gets eaten very quickly.

Bryan McLaughlin:

Yeah, it's not going to last very long. No, no, absolutely. We don't think the solution is to stop consuming news altogether. The news absolutely is essential to our society, both socially and individually. We have a civic responsibility to know what's going on, to pay attention to politics and vote and all those things, and so being informed is important in that regard, socially, but also individually.

Things like the pandemic, if you don't know anything about it, you're not going to be able to take the correct appropriate measures for yourself. So, from a social and individual perspective, there's a lot of important information, crucial information you need to know. So, it's more of a matter of not stopping, but just learning how to do it in a healthier manner.

Shankar Vedantam:

I personally used to be a very big fan of Twitter when it first launched. I found it to be an amazing source of information. It told me about new research being conducted at labs around the world. But as social media has become more gladiatorial and self-referential, I've gradually changed my news diet.

I've come to believe that if you want to stay informed without feeling like your hair is constantly on fire, subscribe to and read a good newspaper, or tune in to your local public radio station. Cut way back on cable TV, and give social media a rest. Call it the curse of the Information Age.

We have built amazing tools to stay informed, stay in touch, and to influence one another. As communicators, we want to hold on to the mic and say absolutely everything that is on our minds as audiences. We sometimes find we cannot look away from the torrent of information that comes hurtling toward us every day. The answer in both cases is to be more discerning. Discerning about the type of information we share and discerning about the sources and amount of information that we consume.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

For today's unsung hero, we turn the mic over to you, our listeners. It's a story from our show, My Unsung Hero. Today's story comes from Sarah Marshall. When Sarah was a teenager, her whole life revolved around getting into a good college. She spent a lot of time thinking about what she could do to be the perfect applicant. When she finally did get into her dream school though, she felt adrift.

Sarah Marshall:

There was something all so remarkable about suddenly being done with that existential question, and the amount of pressure that you put on yourself to get in that suddenly it feels like the thing that you were aiming for the whole time is less relevant, in a way, than the fact that you're not scared about making it happen anymore.

Shankar Vedantam:

Like many teenagers, she'd spent so much time shaping herself into the perfect student that she hadn't had time to develop a sense of self. But there was a place where she felt like she could explore who she really was.

Sarah Marshall:

My freshman year of college, I took my first ever acting class, and the class was in Black Box Theater. It's a small space. And I think there was something about an acting class that was some comfortable or a safe intermediary space for me between being someone who largely had learned how to behave in terms of how to do what you need to do in a classroom and how to meet adults expectations, but where the expectation is not, you're going to memorize these dates or you're going to do this algebra or you're going to write this essay, but you are going to show up as yourself.

And I just remember a particular moment, probably midway through or near the end of this course, when I was doing an improv scene, and I remember this acting professor, Dina, giving us notes, and this moment where she said to me, "you're, you're funny. You're shy, but you're funny." And for me it was a moment of being recognized, in a very matter-of-fact way, for the thing that I knew I was and least wanted to be, and the thing that I most wanted to be and hoped that I was.

And the idea of being witnessed by an adult, who wasn't doing it in a way of, this is good, this is bad, this is acceptable, or this isn't, but this is just what you are, this is what you're bringing to the table, it was scary in the best way, because among many other things, it was a moment of being told, maybe for the first time, that you are showing up as you are, you're not pretending to be who you think you need to be in this moment. You are just bringing what you have to the table and you're offering something with it.

Shankar Vedantam:

Although Sarah didn't go on to become an actor, that moment helped her feel more confident in exploring her creative side. She's now an author and co-host of two podcasts. They're called, You're Wrong About, and, You Are Good.

If you would like to help us build more episodes like this, please act now. Visit support.hiddenbrain.org, and join the hundreds of other Hidden Brain listeners who have signed up to help. Again, .support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.