Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus - Does social media make us angry?Welcome to our first regular Books That Make You Think slot. In these special segments of the week, we are going to be talking about a book that I've come across that, in my mind, sits on the threshold between psychology, business and marketing. 
One thing that I'm really passionate about is helping psychologists and therapists to learn how to build effective businesses and market ourselves, while feeling like we're still serving our clients really well, and like we're doing some good in the world. And one thing that strikes me is that often when I read books, whether that's a psychology book, or a business book, or a marketing book, I'm kind of merging all of those worlds together in my head, and trying to figure out where I sit as a clinical psychologist with the stuff that I'm learning. 
One book that has really made me think this week is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stolen-Focus-Why-Cant-Attention/dp/1526620227/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UQ59MDYHWS7Y&keywords=stolen+focus&qid=1645092020&sprefix=stolen+focus%2Caps%2C72&sr=8-1 (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari), and I talked about it a little bit last week, and people were really interested in some of the learning from it. So I thought that I'd do regular slots, where we can talk about books like Johann Hari's book, which raised some really interesting issues for us, as professionals, and as marketers, as well. So I hope you're gonna find this helpful as people who are in business, but who are also very interested in mental health and promoting good mental health in the world. 


Okay, so the point that I wanted to pick up on this week from Johann Hari's book was the fact that I found quite shocking that on social media, posts that have hate speech in them, words that generate an angry response in us, are the most engaged with and shared posts. So a post that has the words obliterate slam, hate, all of these kind of aggressive words will do much better than a post that is positive. And Johann Hari goes into some of the research behind that and it indicates that this is because it speaks to our negativity bias as humans. And it makes sense, right? We're kind of trained to look out for aggression and violence and pay lots of attention to it as a survival mechanism. It certainly fits with my understanding of how human psychology works. So I don't know why I was that surprised, but I guess I'd never really thought about it before, and it strikes me that there are some clinical implications that need thinking through if this is true on social media, and if the algorithms are going to continue to promote posts like this, that are filled with really hateful language, I think we need to think about that on behalf of our clients and think about how we might need to adapt what we do in the therapy room and in the services that we create for our client groups, in order to take that into consideration. Because it's going to have a major psychological effect on people. Of course it does. So that's the first thing I want to think about today. And the second thing I want to think about is how we take that knowledge and structure our marketing around it. Because there's a bit of a debate here about do we do what works? And we know that what works is all of this negative language and hate speech. Or do we try and do something different, go against the grain of the social media algorithms, and possibly face getting more expensive results or less good results with our social media campaigns? So those are the two things and I'll start with the clinical stuff. Because that's what struck me first when I read this chapter of the book, and I'm really interested to get your thoughts on it. I really want this to be a conversation. So please do let me know what you're thinking as I'm talking about this, especially if you do go on to read the book. I'd be really interested to get some debate going on these...