Less is More

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 their case to a congressional hearing. Today the committee begins hearings on S.1242. They argued that $20 million was a small amount to pay for the many educational and entertainment television programs that the public broadcaster would generate.

The $20 million is so small.

In hour after hour of testimony, advocates argued that funding public broadcasting was good for America and good for America's children. In education. A number of scientific studies pointed to the fact that America may be literally falling behind. Many important government hearings and other public activities. The head of the Congressional Committee, Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island had a reputation for being tough-minded and impatient. All right, now will you answer my question? Had you not done this— 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. All right, Rogers, you got the floor. He talked about what his program meant to America's children. I end the program by saying you've made this day a special day by just your 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. 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.

I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million. 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, Determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. 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 were crafting your argument? Did you think about the phrases you would use, the evidence you would present? At London Business School, Neeru Sivanathan studies the psychology of the arguments we make. Neeru Sivanathan, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Hi, Shankar. Wonderful to be here.

Neeru, I understand that when you were a kid, you were an avid Video gamer, what kind of games were you fascinated by?

I think I played anything and everything I could get my hands on. I think I was 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 kind of dating myself, but yeah, those were the systems I grew up on.

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

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, yeah, typical battles with parents.

Nero 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.

So in Canada, you are required to take French till grade 9, and that's across the entire education system. There are 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. And 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 sort of thought through this and then had the usual arguments, you know, 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.

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.

That's right.

So I think the game that I was probably ref— uh, 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. Um, and my argument was that if I could remember these foreign words that are sort of nonsensical, certainly French words, which were equally nonsensical to me, would be a breeze. Uh, that, yeah, as you could imagine from your laughter, uh, it didn't go so well. I think when I was drafting the essay, it seemed to make perfect sense. Uh, but Unfortunately, that didn't land so well.

It was not the last time Nero 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.

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 kind of top shelf, but needless to say, it was respectable.

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

Highlighted that, you know, their 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 sort of deviated from the type of conversation that I had sort of 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 academics or 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.

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. Niru has examined a case from the early 1980s when a new illness called AIDS was ravaging communities across the United States. Doctors are troubled by the fact that the number of cases continues to rise drastically. About 1,500 cases of AIDS— 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.

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.

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.

That's right. And so this was, you know, we've had other health epidemics since then. This back in the '80s was, you know, 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 a 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.

We've seen different examples of arguments falling short. Nero 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Switch to Progressive, save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Nero 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, Nero, some where People are trying to convince someone else of something they probably shouldn't be convincing someone else of, you know, having your parents allow you to play more video games, or trying to convince someone about something that's important, you know, getting the PhD student admitted into the program, or for the CDC, you know, 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, Niru?

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.

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. Nero says one place this happens is when lawyers present eyewitness testimony in court.

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. 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've got 2 Eyewitnesses, when in fact the weaker eyewitness dilutes the overall strength, if you will, of the argument made by the prosecution.

Niril, 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?

It'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, right? 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.

To demonstrate this idea, Nero 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.

And let's assume you've come up with 4 reasons or 4 arguments for why Mbappé is the best football player. Let's assume of these 4 arguments you've come up with, 2 of them are very strong and they're worth, let's say, 90 points out of 100 in terms of argument strength. So these are incredibly strong arguments and they're worth 90 points out of 100.

So let's say Mbappé has scored many goals, for example, or he is 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.

Indeed, right? And let's assume you come up with 2 additional arguments that are very good, but not as strong as the first 2 and only worth 60 points out of 100. And these could be such things as he plays for the very best team in France, he's signed a great contract, so forth. The calculus that most communicators make, and previewed by your earlier comment, is to think, look, I've got 4 great arguments. Granted, 2 of them are very strong, but the other 2 are still strong. Let me put it all on the table as a way to convince Nero 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 plus 90 plus 60 plus 60.

Mm-hmm.

Turns out, however, receivers of information don't engage in an additive function. They engage in an averaging function.

An averaging function. The 2 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 4 arguments that are collectively worth 300 points.

That means the average score across the 4 arguments Now, if you want to be more persuasive and more influential, you would have been far better off to say, Nero, Mbappé is the very best football player in the world because of reason 1, reason 2, stop. Now I hear 90 plus 90 adds up to 180, divided by 2. Strength of that argument is 90 points, not 75. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. In the world of influence, unlike free coffees, etc., is that the strength of any argument that you make is only as strong, if you will, as your weakest link.

This is what happened when Nero 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, Nero threw 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.

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. And 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 it. Itchy feet. Guess what itchy feet does to the average consumer's evaluation of the risk associated with that drug?

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

That is correct. The itchy feet dilutes people's overall risk assessment of heart attack. Imagine an alternate commercial, Shankar, which is, 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. Turns out this sort of 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 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.

Nero 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, Nero and his team showed people a full list of side effects for a sleep drug. In another, Nero and his team removed 3 of the weakest side effects from the ad. In other words, volunteers were only shown the major side effects.

And what we find is that individuals who are 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 Women in one study were willing to pay more for that drug than the version that only listed the major side effects.

I was called for jury duty a couple of weeks ago, and I went there, but I was not selected. 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. 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's 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. The more detail he added, the weaker the prosecutor's arguments seemed to become. 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.

That's right. We've talked about how to be more persuasive and more influential. And 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 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 a 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.

I asked Nero 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. Nero said that while that hypothesis was plausible, the data did not support it.

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 an 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.

So this is fascinating because I think what I'm hearing you say is that in some ways, there are 2 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?

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 2 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 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.

In other words, Nero 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.

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 engage 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 2, less weight to the second 2, 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.

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

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, you know, 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 That's one vivid example of that main point, and the rest is history, as they say.

Neeru 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. A few years ago, Nero's son made the argument that he needed to stay home from school one day.

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, you know, as with any parent, you're obviously concerned that they're okay. And so once we've sort of had that initial discussion, kind of asked him to explain what his symptoms were, which started with, you know, I'm not feeling well, my tummy isn't feeling well. I think I also have a bit of a headache. I 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, you know, one would've thought, you know, 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 about to experience.

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

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

Nero 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. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens. the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey, with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail 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. Brian McLaughlin remembers getting obsessed with information during the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Every minor change in the polls, Every statement and counterstatement between candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden became cause for sleepless nights.

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

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

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

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

I recall just, you know, a time that 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 and kind of having a hard time putting it down. And I kind of realized that, you know, 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 I've kind of— it's really being disruptive.

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

And she'd 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, right? I just— it just became so second nature that I kind of wouldn't even think about it. I would just I would just out of habit pull out my phone just to check.

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

I definitely started off with, you know, a lot of sleep issues, just kind of waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go to bed. I remember kind of laying down in bed and just noticing how tense my body was, how clenched up my muscles were. I'm just kind of 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.

As a communications researcher at Texas Tech University, Brian 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.

Yeah, so me and my co-authors, Melissa Gottlieb and Devin Mills, we kind of developed this idea of problematic news consumption, which is kind of similar to this idea of news addiction, but we don't think it's technically an addiction. And 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 they've stopped 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. Underregulation, which is like the inability to stop, the just need to do it all the time. And then interference, the extent to which it starts bleeding into and affecting other aspects of your life, like spending time with family, paying attention to work. And so we looked at these components, we found they all kind of work together as a cohesive concept, problematic news consumption. And we looked at that and 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.

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, Brian.

It was definitely higher than we expected. And I think part of it might've just been timing, right? We did this right after the election, still during the midst of the pandemic. So maybe people were a little bit more tuned in and stressed out than normal. But still, it's a pretty wide phenomenon. And almost without fail, 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.

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 well-being. What kind of symptoms were people reporting, Brian?

So for mental well-being, we were looking at anxiety and stress. How frequently do you experience things like like panic, feeling stressed out. And so there were higher levels of generalized stress and anxiety in terms of mental well-being. For physical well-being, we looked at things like headaches, GI issues, back pain, neck pain. And so we kind of collapsed those, just overall incidence of kind of physical ill-being.

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

There's a good example in nature, like gazelles. When they see a lion, everything shoots up, they run away, everything's on high alert. Then once they're safe, everything goes back to normal, they continue grazing, it's like nothing ever happened, right? And so in that case, like the physical reaction, the physiological reaction is helpful, right? It helps you do what you need. Then you can go back with your life. People who are stuck in the news though, and they can't stop thinking about it, it kind of never goes down, right? Because you're just always thinking about it. Either we're reading it or 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 I mean, I love the analogy because imagine now that that gazelle is basically being exposed to the lion, you know, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Right. I mean, you can't function like that, right? If you're just constantly seeing a lion, then you can't ever relax. And then it's just never-ending.

It does seem, though, that that's problematic. I mean, 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. I mean, so if the gazelle that watches the lion 16 hours a day, 7 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.

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. Right? We have kind of a civic responsibility to know what's going on, to pay attention to, you know, politics and, you know, vote and all, all those things. Um, and so being informed is important in that regard, um, socially, but also individually, right? Things like the pandemic— if you don't know anything about it, right, you're not going to be able to take the correct, appropriate measures for yourself. Um, so from a social and individual perspective, like, 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.

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 Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, 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.

There was something also 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.

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.

My freshman year of college, I took my first-ever acting class. And the class was in a black box theater. It's a small space. And I think there was something about an acting class that was some kind of a comfortable or a safe space Yeah. It was a really 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 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.

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 2 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, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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