Jim Davies doesn't think much of newspapers. "I worry that news has none of the characteristics that make something worthwhile," he writes. "It's not fun, it causes anxiety, it gives you a warped sense of reality, and people who watch it are rarely going to do anything with the information they get."
But whether Davies likes it or not, the news has people hooked. And in Riveted, he takes a punt at explaining why. In fact, according to Davies, the appeal of many ideas and actions boils down to six key factors – the pillars of his "compellingness foundations theory". Scratch the surface, he believes, and it all comes back to a person-centered subject matter, the presence of patterns, the odd incongruity and a topic that pushes the buttons of hope or fear. Stimuli that engage our body or senses and thoughts that play to our psychological biases are also likely to appeal. And news agencies, in ticking many of these boxes, milk compellingness like a Jersey cow. We should, Davies warns, be wary. "To a great extent news tells us things that are anomalous and unimportant, which we then perceive as common and probable."
He is hardly the first to think that. But in exploring what makes things gripping, he touches on topics that many will warm to. Rhyming idioms, he explains, are catchy, attractive and appear truthful because they are easy to mentally process and their repetitive sound appeals to our love of patterns; idioms that at first glance appear contradictory stimulate our keen eye for incongruity. Fiction, on the other hand, is so engrossing because we are hard-wired to detect useful information and while part of our brain knows that what we are reading is make-believe, another part thinks the characters, and events, are real. Some aspect of our poor sorry minds really thinks Mr Darcy is out there. Somewhere.
Yet hopping from anecdote to study, scientific consensus to his own untested hypotheses, Davies's narrative feels strangely unstructured. Dishing out ideas, conclusions, and the odd arresting fact, his case studies sometimes seem isolated, their relevance not fully fleshed out. But there are gems amid the muddle – as Davies chillingly points out, our deep-rooted fear of disease has often been hijacked by political rhetoric to damage human relations. "Texts associated with the American Jim Crow laws and with the apartheid system in South Africa have many references to contagion, concerned as they are with the pollution of the white essence," he writes. Our nagging suspicion that the mind exists beyond burial is equally, well, riveting, with Davies discussing a theory that it's down to an extrapolation of our knowledge that our friends and family don't stop existing just because we're 140 miles away watching Poirot.
Indeed the itch that Davies really wants to scratch is religion. Among the myriad hypotheses he airs for belief is that religious ritual appeals to our love of patterns, that our interest in people and purpose means we are drawn to the idea of a human-like God, that biases mean we only interpret evidence in a way that supports our beliefs, and that a predisposition to religion arose through evolution because it counters selfishness, benefiting communities. However even Davies concedes that such psychology has its critics. "It's easy to come up with evolutionary explanations of behaviour," he admits while freely offering several of his own.
But whether or not you buy the notion that religions were founded by a collection of schizotypals and OCD sufferers or that positive words and ideas are associated with an upward direction because we correlate standing up with good health, there's no doubt that some of the proposals Davies discusses are compelling – although given that he repeatedly warns readers to be on their guard against such attractive ideas, he might well have shot himself in the foot. Indeed, with Davies warning that "ideas that seem absurd at first become more plausible after repeated exposure", perhaps it is best to take the hint and read this book just the once.
To buy Riveted for £13.59 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
