Rory Sutherland: On the bias

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One of the strangest things to emerge in market research is how a tiny recontextualisation of a question can lead to a completely different answer. An extreme case of this is the extraordinary discrepancy between how people evaluate their own lives “as experienced locally”, contrasted with what they think of life “in general”. So, for example, if you ask people “how happy are you with life in modern Britain?” you will get far more negative answers than if you ask people “how happy are you with life in Sevenoaks?”

Another bizarre discrepancy arises between people’s individual experience of the NHS and their wider belief in how it is faring overall. Ask generalised questions about the NHS and you’ll get far more negative responses than if you focus on the respondent’s own recent experience, which tends to be fairly favourable.

Of course, one possible explanation is that the news, which in Britain tends to be reported on a national basis, has an extraordinary negativity bias. Some of the blame for this probably resides in the culture among journalists, whereby your status depends on the extent to which you reveal that the world is rotten to the core. One older friend of mine even dates this to Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate exposé, which he says changed journalists’ self-image from drunken hacks to crusaders on the side of truth.

Journalists ever since have focused on finding the next Watergate, to the exclusion of anything else. By contrast, it may even be reputationally harmful to report positive information. The assumption is that any journalist relaying a good news story ‘has been paid to do so’, hence your reputation may suffer from reporting anything nice.

It’s also worth noting that good news and bad news have very different timeframes – making bad events much more newsworthy. In Factfulness, his stats-packed counterblast to the world’s default pessimism, Hans Rosling argues that, in many ways, the world is moving in a better direction than everyone thinks. He attributes our pessimism to the fact that most progress and improvement (the escape from poverty, for instance) tends to be boringly slow, and hence not remotely newsworthy. Bad news, by contrast, happens fast. The collapse of a dam or an invasion happen overnight.

Perceptual asymmetries of this kind are everywhere. At the age of 56, I suddenly realised that my own children, twins of 20, haven’t really noticed any significant technological improvements in the course of their adult lives. Things that to me still seem childishly miraculous, seem completely banal to them. This was brought home to me when sitting on a plane at Sydney airport, waiting to take off to go back home to the UK. I briefly took out my mobile phone and gave a little giggle.

“What the hell are you doing, dad?” asked one of my children. “Oh, just for 20 seconds back there I turned on the central heating at home,” I explained. “God, dad, you’re such an idiot!” To me, born in 1965, it still seems remarkable that you can make a boiler click into life from 25,000 miles away. To them, it is simply how the world works.

The behavioural scientist Robert Cialdini has done a great deal of work investigating media bias. His finding was that the most potent – and perhaps the most insidious and unnoticeable form of media bias – does not arise from the media telling you what to think: their real power lies in telling you what to think about. In other words, by making Downing Street parties a front-page story, you raise the significance of a negative story.

To quote Citizen Kane: “Make the headline big enough, I’ll make the story big enough.” News editors, by determining the relative prominence given to different stories, have an extraordinary power to highlight, downplay and omit.

I do wonder whether we research the young too much and the old too little. Young people lack an adequate frame of comparison. It is too easy to be an anti-capitalist aged 22, when you have seen few of the improvements free markets deliver. Perhaps this explains why older people tend to be a bit more right-wing than their kids.

Someone aged 92, in the case of my father, finds life almost unrecognisable from his childhood. Someone aged 25 has barely noticed anything. There has never been a point in history where the contrast between the experience of the old and the young can have been so stark.