Thanks for this piece. Without a doubt, among the more serious issues is this phenomenon of reading headlines and not content. It’s one of the reasons I quit social media. This article captures the problem perfectly. Perhaps worth mentioning that this behaviour was leveraged often by regime media during lockdowns and I’ve seen the strategy deployed often in scientific papers pushing regime agendas: the content doesn’t support the headline or title. Often conclusions don’t agree with the data presented. And what’s worse is that some readers who did read the content still couldn’t come to their own conclusions, but were misled. . . which was baffling.
That was a great final point. It is as if the headline for some individuals may set an initial state of confirmation bias for how the reader then interprets the article.
Thanks for this piece. Without a doubt, among the more serious issues is this phenomenon of reading headlines and not content. It’s one of the reasons I quit social media. This article captures the problem perfectly. Perhaps worth mentioning that this behaviour was leveraged often by regime media during lockdowns and I’ve seen the strategy deployed often in scientific papers pushing regime agendas: the content doesn’t support the headline or title. Often conclusions don’t agree with the data presented. And what’s worse is that some readers who did read the content still couldn’t come to their own conclusions, but were misled. . . which was baffling.
That was a great final point. It is as if the headline for some individuals may set an initial state of confirmation bias for how the reader then interprets the article.