Why you keep looking

If the tally was high, you might be inclined to call it an addiction or a weakness. I'd call it the expected result of a particular kind of mind meeting a particular kind of product.

Start with the mind. People pay more attention to bad news than to good, and react to it more strongly. This has been measured in the body as well as in surveys. Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournier and Lilach Nir showed real television news stories to people in seventeen countries on six continents while recording their skin conductance and heart rate, which change when a person is aroused or alert. On average, people reacted more strongly to negative stories than to positive ones, and that held across the very different cultures they tested. The researchers also found a good deal of variation between individuals, so some people have the bias more strongly than others.

It's easy to see why a mind would be built like that. For most of human history, the cost of missing a threat was far higher than the cost of missing an opportunity. If you ignore a rustle in the grass that turns out to be nothing, you've lost a second. If you ignore one that turns out to be a snake, you may have lost your life. You're descended from the people who looked.

Now the product. News organisations have always known that bad news sells, and they can now measure it to the decimal point. Claire Robertson and colleagues analysed a very large set of experiments run by a news website, in which different headlines for the same story were shown to different readers at random to see which got more clicks. There were about 105,000 headline variations and several hundred million views. For a headline of average length, each additional negative word raised the rate at which people clicked by 2.3 per cent. Positive words lowered it.

No conspiracy is needed to explain what follows. Editors choose the stories and headlines that people will read, and people read the alarming ones. Apps send the notifications that get opened, and the alarming ones get opened. The news shows you a selection of what happened, and the selection is made, quite mechanically, by what frightens you.

Add the way the product is delivered. A newspaper had an end. You read it and you'd finished. A feed has no end and is never the same twice, so there's always a reason to look again. Every look might turn up something new, and occasionally it does, which is the pattern that makes any checking habit hard to shake. I've described that mechanism in another book in this series, on phones, and won't repeat it here.

Then there are your own reasons, which are good ones.

You want to be a responsible citizen. You vote, you have opinions, and you think people ought to know what's being done in their name.

You want to be safe and prepared. If something's coming, you'd like to see it coming.

You want to be able to take part. When people talk about what's happening, you don't want to be the one who hasn't heard.

And when the world feels uncertain, looking feels like a way of getting a grip on it.

Underneath these are needs nobody should be ashamed of. You want to understand the world, to be safe in it, to do your part, and to belong in the conversation. The question for the next several chapters is whether checking serves those needs. I'll argue that it serves each of them worse than looking once a day would, and that it does the first two active harm.