Recent surveys indicate a rise in “news avoidance”. The latest Reuters Institute poll found four in 10 people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoided the news – up from 29 per cent in 2017 – with many respondents testifying that news consumption worsens their mood.
Information overload, a sense of powerlessness over events and distrust of media were cited as likely contributors. But another possible factor – and one less spoken about – is the nocebo effect.
The phenomenon – sometimes called the “evil twin” of the placebo effect – is typically associated with medical research. The placebo effect is where someone feels better because of positive expectations about taking a treatment that has no effective ingredient. The lesser-known nocebo effect is the reverse – where someone feels worse because of negative expectations about what they’re consuming.
[ Four in 10 people in Ireland ‘worn out by the amount of news there is these days’Opens in new window ]
The phenomenon has implications for how information is communicated by doctors, as Charlotte Blease – a Belfast-born philosopher and researcher on medical ethics – highlights in a recently published book The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick. Overemphasising negative side effects from treatments – such as headaches and fatigue – can cause people to experience some of those effects, research shows.
In one study on responses to the Covid-19 vaccine, researchers found than more than two-thirds of the common side effects people experienced after the jab could be attributed to the nocebo effect rather than the vaccine itself.
The research has implications for areas outside of medicine, Blease says, citing “trigger warnings” in education. “Communicating to people that they may feel worse after engaging with content may actually set them up for that very response.”
An intriguing question is whether doctors should withhold negative information from patients to limit the risk of nocebo.
“One proposal is framing the information in a way that is truthful but positive,” says Blease. “For example, instead of saying 20 per cent of people experience negative side effects, it might be better to say ‘80 per cent of people don’t experience any side effects’. Another approach could be to directly advise that some people report side effects but it is up to the individual if they want to learn more. This option would also support the agency of the patient to decide what they want to know.”
Supporting “the agency of the patient” has personal meaning for Blease. Her late partner, the Belfast journalist Henry McDonald, spent years battling with medical professionals to obtain accurate information and records about his condition before his death in February 2023. Blease, who works with research units at Harvard Medical School and Uppsala University in Sweden, later wrote about the experience in the Guardian, for which McDonald worked as Ireland correspondent. She says “doctors still often cast themselves in an almost priestly role as mediators of information ... In my experience, patients want to be in control”.
But what has the nocebo effect got to do with “news avoidance”?
News is consumed today with two negative auras surrounding it. First is the traditional negativity bias of media organisations – the press mentality of “if it bleeds it leads”. Second is a negative narrative about those organisations – a growing hostility in certain quarters to journalism.
Increasingly people are getting their news, not from newspapers or broadcasters directly but rather from links attached to social media posts – and those posts are not infrequently laced with invective and condemnation about the articles being shared. Even basic news reporting – conveying essential factual detail about events – cannot survive on platforms without attracting a swam of comments to the effect that journalists are “gaslighting” readers, telling lies or “hiding the real truth”.
Some criticism of journalism is, of course, justified. But some is also unbalanced or self-serving, like the claim by X’s Elon Musk that “legacy media” is “a sadness generator” in contrast, he argues, to the platform he owns.
Asked whether the media is making us sick, Blease replies: “I think it’s reasonable to suggest there could be times when the media causes nocebo effects. That said, we also need more empirical research ... The media likes to follow the alarming, anxiety-inducing, negative stories, as humans and consumers of media we are much more attentive and vigilant about things that harm us. This is the stuff that makes us click. In that sense, I’d resist ‘blaming’ the media per se, as they are simply giving us the negative fodder we want.
“However, the more we engage with negative stories, it is conceivable that the worse we feel and some people may be more vulnerable to nocebo effects than others. I would say that during the Covid 19 pandemic, many of us learned that too much focus on the news cycle really was worse for our health,” says Blease, who has played a role in promoting philosophy in schools in Ireland.
In sum, “news avoidance” is a lot more complicated than it first appears. And “legacy media” should be careful not to misdiagnose what’s going on, nor to overreact by pivoting from news gathering to entertainment. It may be the case that what’s turning people off is not news per se but rather the way in which platforms most commonly associated with news dissemination operate.