Verified by 
If you have been following the news like I have then you may be feeling stressed. Especially if you’re female: women become more susceptible to stress after reading bad news and they remember those news stories better. My husband would agree with that as I unload my days catch of misery while he is trying to unwind and get to sleep. Sometimes you see a news link, and you really know you should leave it alone, but it’s irresistible, like the urge to put your hand in a flame or jump off a cliff edge. (No? Just me then…)
If you read different news sources and talk to people from around the world you soon find that the same stories can be given a very different spin depending on the source. That’s not too surprising. We know that people are generally biased toward groups they feel part-of or connected to. But a new study by Tiane Lee, Michele Gelfand and Yoshihisa Kashima in Maryland shows just how this bias keeps on growing as stories are retold so that it can escalate a conflict over time – independent of the conflict itself.
They took 196 male and female undergraduates and organised them into 49 sets of four. These sets of four would actually be chains of story-tellers rather like a game of Chinese whispers – without the whispering. One person in each chain read about a dispute between two groups of students living next to each other. Each person in the chain had to retype their version of the story which was taken to the next person in a different room – but no-one knew whether they had the original version or not.
There were two versions of the original story. In the partisan version one of the groups of students was a group of the readers’ friends while in the neutral version both groups were from different cities. When the researchers read and analysed all the retyped accounts they found clear differences depending on which version they had started with. The partisan accounts laid the blame on the other group, empathized only with their friends and tended to justify their friends’ bad behaviour. In a follow-up questionnaire they were also keen to get revenge on the other group: ‘I would want them to get what they deserve’.
Here is a typical neutral account: ‘One night the students from G threw a loud party .... The students from R complained that the guests from the party had left trash and cigarette butts everywhere. The students from G denied this and then accused the R group of leaving gross trash out.’ These neutral accounts tended to be, well, neutral - because there is nothing in the original account to indicate that one group is more to blame than the other.
Compare that with a typical partisan account: ‘Our friends on the third floor got into a fight with their neighbors. They threw a party a few nights ago ... The day after the party, their neighbors came by to complain. They whined about the noise level and how the guests left trash in the hallway. However the truth was that the neighbors are the ones that always leave the trash in the hallway.’ In the partisan accounts, their friends were just having a good time but those other students were just whiny, trash-dumping kill-joys. The language in the partisan accounts is more colourful, less passive – and I for one certainly find it more interesting to read.
Over the chain of 4 accounts the biased retelling clearly increased with each subsequent retelling showing how third-party accounts can escalate a dispute over time. So it’s not just about a single, biased version of events – the stories evolve with each retelling, further driving conflict independent of the conflict itself. Recall that none of the writers in this study have anything to do with the original dispute but their increasingly one-sided accounts have taken on ‘a life of their own’.
The authors suggest that ‘third parties to a conflict should be sceptical when listening to conflict narratives and question their authenticity.’ Even the most dependable and sober of news sources seem to be out to terrify the life out of me these days. Sometimes I read the headline and as if the plain story wasn’t scary enough I can see that the wording is intended to alarm me – just in case I’m not alarmed enough already. It’s the bread and butter of journalism as it gets harder and harder to compete for our attention: neutral news is no news. And then there’s social medialand where it’s hard to tell fact from fantasy at the best of times and competition for attention knows no boundaries.
But the kind of chronic stress people get from increasingly alarming and threatening daily news produces depressing feelings of helplessness. The only way to combat that helplessness is to take some sort of action (or stop reading the news). Then the choice is – do you act to increase or decrease conflict in the world? Because even high risk conflict can be preferable to helplessness. Partisan ideas about blame and revenge become critical at this point. The relentless media outpouring from all sources and all sides increasingly pushes people to make this choice and all of us in the chain of messengers must take some responsibility for the outcome.
