Does Personality Predict Individual Variation in Negativity Biases in News Consumption?

There is abundant evidence that humans regularly prioritize negative information. On average, people tend to focus more on negative information than positive information, and people tend to be more affected by negative information. While studies find that negativity biases are widespread, there also are significant individual differences. Some people are more reactive to negative information than others. Although some initial work suggested that individuals exhibiting larger negativity biases tend to be on the right side of the ideological spectrum, recent research has failed to find systematic differences between conservatives and liberals in psychophysiological reactions to negative and positive information. This paper focuses on the role of personality. Is the sensitivity to negative information in news consumption linked to personality traits across the globe? We examine the relationship between personality and negativity biases in physiological reactions with massive cross-national experimental data. We conducted the same psychophysiological experiment in 17 countries on six continents. These places differ in terms of cultural attributes, economic development, media environments, and political institutions. Participants were exposed to both negative and positive television news stories while their electrodermal activity was measured by sensors. Personality was assessed in a post-experimental survey using the ten-item personality inventory of the Big 5 traits (TIPI). We use these data to test whether the differences in physiological reactions between negative and positive news stories are related to personality traits across these various cross-national settings.