Contradictheory: ‘Don’t be lazy, read the whole darn thing’

Headlines act as powerful frames, influencing both comprehension and memory. If a headline misleads, that first wrong impression sticks, even if the article later corrects it. — 123rf

“Unai Emery brands Aston Villa players ‘LAZY’,” shouted the headline. That might seem warranted, given that the club hadn’t won a single one of its first five Premier League games and only managed to score a single goal. But it was uncharacteristic for a manager known for keeping a level head with the press. 

Did he really lose it? When you actually read the article, you’ll realise that what he actually said was, “We were lazy sometimes in defence”. These are two completely different uses of the word. One implies a lack of overall effort, the other means they didn’t defend well. But let’s be honest, “Emery asks players to defend better” doesn’t get clicks. “Lazy!” does.

The truth is, that’s how headlines work. They grab attention. They’re short, sharp, and straight to the point. But in being like that, they strip away context, and perhaps even worse, make your brain create assumptions about the story.

Take another example. The headline from The Borneo Post last week was, “Sarawak deputy minister slams academic’s suggestion to delay English teaching”. The first impression is that a high-ranking politician thinks English is important for young Malaysians, and anyone who disagrees is holding the country back.

But the second idea that is conveyed is that some academic somewhere is asking to delay teaching English. Specifically, the article says, “She said children needed to master the national language first until age seven before focusing on other languages like English.”

I tried to find the original source for this. The Borneo Post article references a report by Harian Metro. I found one where a professor highlights that some Malaysian children are very fluent in English but at the expense of their Bahasa Malaysia. She asked: if English becomes their primary language, does BM lose its role as the national language?

But nowhere in that version does she say how old children should be before beginning to learn English. That line appeared in a deleted article hosted on yet another online news website, whose page I had to dig up through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Apart from the phrase “before they are seven or eight years old”, it’s otherwise similar to Harian Metro’s piece.

I’m not going to delve into the conspiracies of why this version of the article has been deleted. But a piece discussing whether English is in danger of displacing BM as an everyday language is far more nuanced than a simpler one saying “don’t teach kids English”.

But the truth is that many people never get past the headline. A study of social media behaviour by Columbia University in New York found that 59% of the links shared on Twitter were never clicked at all – the headline wasn’t just the first thing people who didn’t click on the links read, it was the only thing.

No wonder online conversations descend into a flurry of confrontational threads. It’s like starting a mass brawl because you don’t like the sound of another person’s voice, but then you discover that 59% of the people you’re brawling with are actually deaf.

Why is it so hard to read beyond the headline? Partly because our attention spans are not what they used to be. Online American publication Slate Magazine conducted an analysis of reader habits and found that 38% of people bounce within seconds of landing on a page. Another 5% don’t scroll down reports at all. The majority of the remainder get about halfway through, but only a quarter of those make it to the end of an article. (So if you’re still reading this paragraph, congratulations: you’re in rare company.)

Even when people do make it to the end, headlines still shape what they take away. Research from Ohio State University in the United States shows that headlines act as powerful frames, influencing both comprehension and memory. If a headline misleads, that first wrong impression sticks, even if the article later corrects it.

Psychologists call this the “continued influence effect”. For example, if you’re told someone is a jerk before you meet them, then you’ll probably spend most of the meeting funnelling what he says through an “Is he being a jerk?” filter.

Social media makes this worse, continually giving you something big, loud, and dramatic to react to, so you react instantly, before it disappears into the ether. Nuance just clogs up the text-box word limit.

What is the solution?

First, slow down. A study published by researchers from American institutions Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that asking people to pause and reflect on whether a headline is true or false made them be more sceptical of its veracity.

(Unfortunately, they also found that articles without that warning were then more likely to be accepted to be true – so you have to assume the warning is always there!)

Second, read the whole article in one go. Yes, it takes longer than scrolling through 50 Facebook posts, but trust me, it’s better for you.

And finally, and perhaps more controversially, journalists need to write better. Headlines need to catch attention, but they should do it responsibly, without exaggerating to the point of distortion.

Because if headlines are all we read, we’re left with a society built on snap judgments and half-truths. And we’re missing the deeper discussion, be it about what it means for a football manager to demand a particular style of play, or how we promote multilingualism while keeping a national identity.

During Aston Villa’s game tonight against Burnley you will undoubtedly see Unai Emery shouting from the sidelines. Perhaps you might do well to imagine him shouting at you: “Don’t be lazy; read the whole darn thing.”

In his fortnightly column Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.