There was supposed to be 4 to 6 inches of snow on the ground when I woke up this morning.  It was in all the forecasts – a spring blizzard on the day before the first official day of spring.  The snow was supposed to start around midnight and we were going to wake up to a winter wonderland.  It was all that people talked about last night.  People spent yesterday preparing mentally (and by that I mean complaining and fretting) – getting ready to shovel, bringing the winter jackets back out, and planning on leaving earlier for their commute to work.

It didn’t snow last night, though, and even though it’s snowing right now, it probably won’t add up to more than an inch of accumulation.  So all that worrying last night was wasted effort.

This demonstrates how our group expectations can be swayed by what experts are telling us through the press.  It’s the same process that’s happening in the media when they talk about the state of the economy.  Just like a few meteorologists can influence people’s opinions about what the weather will be like (even though they can’t accurately predict the future weather accurately), so too does the media shape our thoughts about what the future will be like (even though, like the meteorologists, journalists and editors have no “magic 8–ball” to tell them the future).

The danger with the media reporting on a topic like the state of the economy is that by influencing opinion on where the economy is heading, it actually does influence how people feel and think which can influence how they act.  It’s not like predicting the weather, because people’s thoughts on the weather don’t have a noticeable effect.  In the case of the economy thought, their actions can have an impact on what happens in the economy.

 In fact, people throw around words like "media", "economy', and "recession" like they are real, actual things. They aren't. They are an amalgamation of lots of people and organizations with a lot of different agendas (often contradictory) acting in many different ways. So if the headlines read "The Economy is Going Down the Toilet", it is more likely that the people who read that headline will now think the economy is in trouble. They will then take actions that reflect their belief that the economy is in trouble, which will only exacerbate the problem. When this happens over and over on an individual level, you see the macro-economic effects. It's like having a run on a bank. If everyone thinks the bank is failing and runs to get their money, then the bank runs out of money and fails. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

My suggestion - stop reading the newspaper and don't watch the news. They're just trying to sell papers and advertising space - and nothing sells as well as bad news. So they have incentives to overemphasize the negative.  If you do want to stay abreast of what’s going on in the world, be very picky about where you get your information, or you’ll be getting out the snowblower when you don’t need to.