The Effects Of Construal Level On Negativity Bias In Emergency

Nowadays,the Internet has entered into thousands of households,and the connection between Internet and people is getting closer and closer than before.There is a large amount of information on the Internet,which is constantly recognized,interpreted and disseminated by people,thus affecting their individual and group behavior.Combined with intuitive experience and scientific research in various fields,we find that compared with positive information,it is negative information on the Internet,such as negative reports and rumors about various kinds of emergencies that has been attached more importance on,thus it is often easier to attract the attention of individuals,be better cognitively processed,and have a higher probability of being spread throughout the whole Internet.The psychological mechanism behind this phenomenon is Negativity Bias.It refers to the basic psychological bias that humans and animals developed and retained in the course of evolution,that is,to give greater weight to negative things,such as events and objects,and follow the principles that “Bad is more important than good ” in areas including attention,memory,emotion,decision-making and more.Negative bias is influenced by many cognitive variables.For example,previous studies have found that Construal Level,the level of cognitive representation of things affects negativity bias of individuals,sometimes eliminates or even reverses it to the positive side.However,most of the previous researches were based on the basic phenomenon,and rarely considered the social reality of our country,especially in the context of network emergencies.Therefore,against this background,the current paper has carried out three studies to gradually explore the impact of construal level on negativity bias and the mechanism behind it.In Study 1,the relationship between individual construal level and negativity bias was investigated by the method of online questionnaire.A total of 113 effective subjects were recruited,and their individual construal level and cognitive negativity bias were measured by behavior recognition scale and the questionnaire of negativity bias.The results of correlation and regression analysis showed that there were significant negative correlation between individual construal level and negative interpretation bias as well as negative memory bias.The higher the individual construal level,the lower the negative interpretation bias and negative memory bias.In Study 2,a 2 × 2 recognition memory experiment was carried out on 70 participants under the background of network emergency.The within-group independent variables are construal level(high construal level vs low construal level)and the words nature(positive vs negative).The dependent variables are recognition rate and two indicators from signal detection theory(hit rate & correct rejection rate).The results showed that:(1)For the recognition rate,the main effect of words nature was significant.The recognition rate of negative words was significantly higher than that of positive words.The interaction between words nature and construal level was significant.The simple test showed that the recognition rate of negative words is higher than that of positive words at low construal level,which showed a negativity bias,and at high construal level,the recognition rate of negative words was reduced,thus the gap between negative words and positive words was narrowed,and the negative bias was weakened.(2)For the hit rate,the main effect of construal level was significant.The hit rate of low construal level words was significantly higher than that of high construal level words.The hit rate of negative words decreased with the increase of construal level,while the hit rate of positive words did not change significantly.(3)For the correct rejection rate,the main effect of words nature was significant.The correct rejection rate of negative words was significantly higher than that of positive words.The interaction between words nature and construal level was significant.The si mple test showed that the correct rejection rate of negative words is higher than that of positive words at low construal level,which showed a negativity bias,and at high construal level,the correct rejection rate of positive words was increased,thus the gap between negative words and positive words was narrowed,and the negative bias was weakened.The results of study 2 showed that increasing construal level reduced negativity bias of the participants by decreasing the hit rate of negative words and increasing the correct rejection rate of positive words.In study 3,a 2 × 2 eye-tracking experiment was carried out on 53 participants under the background of network emergency.The within-group independent variables are construal level(high construal level vs low construal level)and the words nature(positive vs negative).The dependent variables are six types of eye-tracking indicators(fixation time,fixation counts,total fixation time,visit time,visit counts,total visit time),which reflect the distribution of cognitive resources in the process reading network emergency article.The results of six types of eye-tracking indicators showed that the interaction between words nature and construal level was significant.The increasing of construal level reduced the cognitive resources allocated to positive words and raised the cognitive resources allocated to negative words,which made the allocation of cognitive resources to the positive words and the negative words becomes more balanced.In summary,we found that:(1)There were significant negative correlation between individual construal level and negative interpretation bias as well as negative memory bias.(2)Increasing construal level reduced negativity bias of the participants by decreasing the hit rate of negative words and increasing the correct rejection rate of positive words.(3)Increasing the construal level made the distribution of cognitive processing resources of positive and negative words tend to be more balanced,and thus eliminated negativity bias.