Global Survey Finds 40 Percent of Adults Avoid News at Least Sometimes

A 2025 Reuters Institute survey found that 40 percent of adults worldwide avoid the news at least sometimes, the highest share recorded. Respondents cited bad mood, overload, and inability to act as primary reasons.

Psychologists describe the pattern as negativity bias, a tendency to attend more to threats than to neutral or positive events. The bias developed when missing a local danger carried higher costs than overreacting to a false alarm. Modern media now deliver simultaneous reports of distant conflicts, financial shocks, and disasters.

A study in Nature Human Behaviour tracked more than 105,000 headlines viewed nearly six million times and found each additional negative word raised click-through rates. Separate physiological studies recorded stronger bodily responses to negative than to positive stories.

Researchers have defined Problematic News Consumption as a pattern producing preoccupation and disruption of daily life. In a 2022 study, 17 percent of American adults met criteria for severe levels. Within that group, 61 percent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six percent of those without the condition.

For members of minority or immigrant communities, repeated coverage of harm to their group can add cognitive load even when they are not the direct target.

The report states that complete avoidance reduces access to accurate information a democracy requires. Recommended steps include limiting news to fixed time windows, favoring longer verified articles over short social-media posts, and identifying concrete actions that follow from the information received.

The same guidance advises recognizing content designed to provoke strong negative reactions rather than to convey verified events.