We’re surrounded by bad news. Stories of terrorism, natural disasters, violence, crime, corruption and economic pessimism hog the headlines.
When you have good news and bad news, always give the good news first.
Humans have a bias towards bad and dramatic news. We pay more attention to it. We are drawn to it. As a result, we buy newspapers or click on links with negative and novel headlines.
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
In an example of this, one Russian news website, City Reporter, decided to publish good news only. Their daily traffic dropped by two-thirds! City Reporter deputy editor Viktoriya Nekrasova reported afterwards “We looked for positives in the day’s news, and we think we found them, but it looks like almost nobody needs them. That’s the trouble.”
This physiological predisposition towards dramatic and negative events may be the result of an evolutionary advantage. The cavemen who prioritized negative news — like a saber-tooth tiger attack on someone nearby — lived.
While we don’t need to defend ourselves against giant cats anymore, our brains are still wired to outweigh the potential costs of negative information above the potential benefits of positive information.
Why should you give the good news first?
We are so drawn to bad news that if we’re told the negative first, we don’t pay attention to the positive that follows. For example, if you start an employee performance review with the fact that the rest of the team find them aggressive and uncooperative, they’ll ignore the next part of how they’re really good at client engagements.