You can not read further than the headline – Hi-Tech – Kommersant

The growing flow of information on the Internet has already led to the fact that more people do not read the news beyond the headline. Recently, the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, who owns a fortune of $ 180 billion, fell into such a trap – he reposted fake news about a non-existent CNN program on Twitter, having read only the headline. Scientists around the world are already trying to find out the causes of the phenomenon, to understand what it threatens and how to solve such a problem.

“We wish you well”

Last week in the US happened a curious case with the new owner of the Twitter microblogging network, Elon Musk. As you know, he launched violent reforms in the company, which caused a mixed reaction both among users and in the media. Musk tweeted the following CNN headline: “Elon Musk threatens free speech on Twitter by simply allowing people to speak freely.” However, it quickly became clear that this headline was fake, and the news headline allegedly from CNN was just a photoshop. Representatives of CNN responded to Musk’s tweet: “Our channel has never had such a program and such news.” And sarcastically added: “We wish you good health.” Elon Musk responded to this in his own style: “Lmaoooo” (“Laughing”).

The case of Elon Musk and his thoughtless reposting of a fake headline highlighted a problem that scientists have been talking about for several years: people are increasingly reading only the headline and less and less the news itself. A few years ago, research showedthat out of ten Americans who read news on social networks, only two read the news itself by clicking on the link, and the remaining eight read only the headline in the link. But if earlier researchers only recorded such a phenomenon, now they are trying to find out its causes, to understand what it threatens the media, the readers themselves, and they want to solve this problem – if it is a problem at all.

Among the reasons for the superficial perception of information are several factors. One of them is a psychological phenomenon that the researchers called “The overconfidence of the reader.”

In late August, scientists at the University of Texas published study about the fact that when sharing information on a topic on social networks, people often believe that they understand this topic – even if they did not read the entire article that they decided to repost, but only its title. In the study, 98 students were given links to online notes that they could share with their friends or retell the content to them. The articles were titled “Why Movie Theater Popcorn Is So Expensive” and “Red Meat Causes Cancer.”

After a while, the students were asked to tell the researchers about the news in their own words. It turned out that those who shared only the headline of the news with friends had a noticeably higher subjective understanding of the content – they believed that they knew what the news was about, but this was not always true. Those who read beyond the headline showed a higher level of both objective and subjective knowledge of the topic of the article – they believed that they knew the news, and they really knew it. It is noteworthy that many who read the news on the topic began to believe that they already understood this topic as a whole, although they had read only one material on it, and fell into the trap of excessive self-confidence. Billionaire Elon Musk fell into this trap.

Previously The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism conducted a study that showed that only 51% of consumers who “read” news online read the articles themselves. 26% read part of the article, and 22% read only the title or the first few lines.

Back in 2014, American journalists at National Public Radio (NPR) held on Facebook (the company belongs to Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) experiment. They put a link there to an article with the headline: “Why Americans Stopped Reading?”. And the caption under the picture in FB read: “What happened to our brains?”. In the comments under the link, many people began to share their opinions about why Americans stopped reading and what happened to their brains. But if they had gone beyond the headline and clicked on the link, they would have seen it lead to NPR’s April 1st greetings, which read: “Dear readers, congratulations on April 1st. We have long had a suspicion that many of those who comment on our materials, in fact, do not even read them. If you’re reading this text, like the post, but don’t comment below it. We want to see how many people “have something to say” about this article.”

Four years later, NPR repeated the prank, this time on Twitter. The headline read: “Americans don’t read the way they used to. Why doesn’t America read anymore? And this time, under the tweet, there were many people who had something to say about the problem. But there were those who nevertheless went beyond the headline and saw that this was just a congratulation on April 1. “Nice prank,” they wrote under the NPR Twitter post.

The brain of an aquarium fish

The Conscious Vibe in their study of this phenomenon mentions another reason why people don’t read the news but only the headlines is a psychological phenomenon “reader perception bias” which threatens a more serious violation in the perception of the surrounding reality. If a person sees a headline that matches his personal and emotional ideas about a topic, then he does not read the article itself – which, however, may contain arguments both “for” and “against” what is in the headline.

Especially often the reader’s perception bias manifests itself when reading materials with headlines that carry an emotional coloring or excessive sensationalism: “The secret of the Egyptian pyramids is revealed” or “Scientists have unraveled the secret of the sinister Bermuda Triangle.” That is, the reader believes that: a) the secret of the pyramids exists – although what exactly this secret consists of and what secret the heading speaks of is not clear; and b) that this mystery can be solved. It is the prevalence of perception bias when reading the headline on an emotional level that has led to such a mass phenomenon as clickbait – screaming headlines for such articles on the Internet that do not quite carry or even do not carry the answer promised in the heading, often saying that these are just “speculations of scientists”.

Another reason for the excessively superficial perception of information on the Internet, scientists call the abundance of digital content, causing a sharp reduction in attention span.

By data According to Microsoft research, from 2000 to 2015 alone, the average attention span of people when reading information on the Internet decreased by 30% – from 12 to 8 seconds. it lessthan an aquarium goldfish, which is able to focus on an object for a full 9 seconds.

Decreased attention spans and an inability to focus on reading and thinking through the growing masses of information on the Internet lead to yet another psychological phenomenon known as “Dunning-Kruger effectand described in 1999. This is a distortion of the perception of information in people with a low level of knowledge on any issue. Having a meager stock of knowledge on this topic, they begin to draw erroneous conclusions and often extend this approach to areas related or even completely far from the original topic, coming to a false definition of the limits of competence and overestimation of their abilities.

Another side of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that highly skilled people, on the contrary, tend to underestimate their abilities and suffer from a lack of self-confidence, considering others to be more competent. Thus, less competent people generally have a higher opinion of their own abilities than competent people (who also tend to assume that others evaluate their abilities as low as they do themselves). It is noteworthy that some philosophers guessed about such a phenomenon long before the invention of the Internet. This can be said, for example, by the sayings of Lao Tzu: “He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know” and Socrates: “I know that I know nothing, but others do not know this either.”

The speed of information is digging my grave

The researchers suggest that it was the decrease in the duration of concentration of attention and the massive spread of the Dunning-Kruger effect among Internet users (who, unlike the contemporaries of Socrates and Lao Tzu, have much more opportunities for searching and qualitatively analyzing information) that caused such a mass phenomenon. like Internet fakes – which in many countries have already begun to fight and on corporateand on state level.

Another danger of reading news no further than the headline, some researchers consider the growth of emotionality and negativity in the reporting of news by journalists.

In October, a group of scientists from New Zealand published the results of a long-term study of the work of the American press. From 2000 to 2019, they analyzed the evolution of 23 million headlines in 47 popular US media of a wide variety of socio-political orientations – from more right to more left. It was found that “the frequency of news and headlines with more emotional negative content, evoking emotions such as anger, annoyance, disappointment, increased markedly.” News with headlines like “Nine people killed in Brazilian prison riot” has become much more than news like “New lenses restore vision and give rest to the eyes.”

According to the authors of the study, by giving more emotional and negative headlines, the media are trying to draw more attention to their sites – after all, in order to understand how the new lenses work, one must read not only the headline, but also the text, and headlines about riots and deaths can be “entertained” reader at least a whole day, keeping him on your site. Another conclusion of New Zealand scientists: most of all emotional and negative headlines were abused by the media of more right-wing, conservative views. However, since 2013, this trend has been increasingly picked up by the media of more leftist, liberal views.

Researchers advise The media do not only chase clicks and observe the measure in the emotional component of their materials and headlines. As far as readers are concerned, the conclusion of the scientists is this: “If you feel that your news diet is causing you more and more depression, you are not crazy – your level of depression simply depends on what you read.”

Evgeniy Khvostik