The Editor speaks: Are we gradually becoming so impacted on bad news it doesn’t shock us anymore?
Nastiness makes a bigger impact on our brain than good news.
And that is due to the brain’s “negativity bias”. Your brain is simply built with a greater sensitivity to unpleasant news. The bias is so automatic that it can be detected at the earliest stage of the brain’s information processing. – Ohio State University psychologist John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D.
Our attitudes are more heavily influenced by downbeat news than good news, Cacioppo says.
However, if we read or see more bad things do we accept it and become insensitive to it?
Yes. In response to terrorist attacks, daily reports of assassinations and multitudes of castaways drifting in solitude, we hardly feel anything. We live in an era in which we are becoming insensitive to bad news especially ones involving human tragedies.
It seems to be the norm now to even feel more powerful when others suffer.
Joan and I went to the cinema last Saturday but the movie we went to see was sold out. We ended up watching the next one showing and the title didn’t tell us anything – “Ready or Not”. When I asked the counter assistant he looked up the genre and told me it was a comedy.
Forty-five minutes later we sat down to enjoy a good laugh.
Once, and only once we did laugh. In fact the whole audience laughed. There were a few titters. The advertised synopsis of the movie is. “READY OR NOT follows a young bride as she joins her new husband’s rich, eccentric family in a time-honored tradition that turns into a lethal game with everyone fighting for their survival.
Doesn’t sound very amusing and I expect most of you are asking what has this to do with the above content I have been writing about in this Editorial?
The assistant didn’t read all of the genre, either by design or he missed it. The missing word was HORROR.
A comedy horror move? Oh yes.
There was more bloody, horrific, scenes in the 1 hour 35 minutes of running time I have ever seen, and I grew up in the Hammer Horror movies when I was much younger.
So much of it in fact I, along with most of the audience go so used to it that when a young lady opened a door and said, “Hi”, an arrow from a crossbow shot into her eye and appeared through the back of her head with blood spurting everywhere, we all roared with laughter.
The heroine (the bride)was the only person left alive at the end of the movie, bullet wounds seeping with blood from her body, fingers hanging off her hands, and sitting on the house door step waiting patiently for the police to arrive.
Apart from the first of the killings the shocking scenes, that did get more bloody, didn’t shock us anymore. Our brain got so impacted with the all the gore it became the norm.
One word answer to your headline Colin – Yes! If you look at what is happening on the streets of UK cities now – youngsters here live for so long on the simulated violence of movies and computer games they don’t take it seriously until the knife they’re carrying kills someone and they face a long jail term. Same with young drivers and motorcyclists. It’s all a big game until someone dies.
Remember this story – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/14/cyclist-charlie-alliston-killed-pedestrian-blamed-crash-kim-briggs-court-told The boy (I can’t call him a man) was in total denial because that was how he’d grown up.
If, like myself, you’ve not only seen real violence up front but also learned the skills required to mete it out yourself you not only respect it but respond in a very complicated way to news stories. It’s a sort of, ‘Been there, seen it, done it, didn’t like it, don’t want to have to do it again,’ reaction.
The other thing I’ve noticed at recent family funerals (and there have been rather too many of those) is a distinctly different reaction to the loss between the generations. At the end of my younger brother’s funeral several of us who’d grown up with him stood at the coffin crying our eyes but his four children, two in their 20s and two in their 30s, sat through the whole ceremony like it was some kind of event. Very weird!
The big rub comes when people who have shut themselves off from reality get caught up in it. What do they do then? Blame everybody else. How many times have you heard the family of some drug-dealing scumbag who has either been murdered or is facing a murder charge bleating on about what a good person he was? I had occasion a while back to take down a 14-year-old lout who had snatched a woman’s purse. It was done by the book, recorded by CCTV and resulted in minimal damage to the kid but his parents went apes***. OK, fine if that’s how they want to bring the boy up but what happens if his mother or father gets attacked like that, or his sister gets raped? They’ll be calling for the death penalty and slagging the police off.
We’ve just had it here – https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-20-appears-in-court-charged-with-murder-of-pc-andrew-harper-a4217096.html I can’t legally post any details but apparently the defendant isn’t exactly unknown to the police.
I had to edit my editorial piece down from the first draft. I agree with everything you said and thanks for sharing it.
Colin