Negative brand news, social media, and the propensity to doomscrolling: measuring and validating a new scale

Abstract

Negative media coverage can have a significant impact on businesses and society. For instance, depressing news about the unethical features or harmful effects of a product or a service (e.g., Maggi’s lead issue) can significantly impact their brand image among consumers. We focused on studying whether consumers have a tendency to consume such negative news through online platforms. While there exists a considerable amount of empirical research and industry reports illustrating the implications of such news on businesses; interestingly, the consumer perspective on the same is rarely studied. In the current study, the authors have developed and validated the psychometric properties of “Propensity to Doomscrolling” (PTD), which is an individual tendency to surf/scroll through large amounts of painful, disheartening and sad news on the Internet. We started our scale with 12 items developed from qualitative interviews and existing literature on doomscrolling and compulsive negative news consumption. The final PTD scale consists of two subdimensions: perceived survival threat and fear of death, which can be measured through a seven-item scale proposed and initially tested in this study.