How Do Headlines Influence Our Thinking?

Headlines are important." "Misleading Headlines Can Deceive You." "How Reading Influences What You See." "How Bad Headlines Leave a Bad Impression." Reasons Why Headlines Matter." "You'll Never Believe How Critical It Is to Have an Accurate Headline."

All of these titles were considered by my editor as possible titles for this post. And in fact, the one we choose could be the most crucial aspect of this piece. Everyone understands that a headline influences the number of people who read a story, especially in these days of social media. But, maybe, more importantly, a title affects how people read and remember a story. The experience is framed by the headline. A headline can indicate the type of piece you're about to read—news, opinion, research, or LOLcats—and it can also set the tone for the rest of the article.

Psychologists have long recognized that first impressions matter—what we see, hear, feel, or experience in our first encounter with anything influences how we perceive the remainder of it. Articles are no different. And, just as people can control the impression, they make by dressing appropriately, the title can subtly influence how others perceive the text that follows. A headline can influence what current knowledge is triggered in your head by attracting attention to specific elements or facts. A headline's choice of phrase might influence your reading attitude, causing you to recall details that match what you were expecting afterward. For example, the title of this article—"A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep?"—is completely correct. However, it is likely to focus attention on a single aspect of the composition. People would remember it differently if I had labeled it "Why We Need Eight Hours of Sleep."

As a result of these variations in perception, when a headline is even marginally incorrect, issues develop. Last year, the Daily Express in the USA headlined, "Air pollution now a major cause of lung cancer." The article, on the other hand, says nothing like that, or at least not exactly. Instead, it stated that pollution was a leading "environmental" cause, with other factors such as smoking remaining the primary culprits. It's simple to see why someone might choose to play that kind of opening. Caveats don't fit in single columns, and once people are interested enough to read the article, they'll figure out the details on their own. Reading the article, however, may not be enough to correct the headline's misleading.

Ullrich Ecker, a psychologist, and cognitive neuroscientist, was thinking about these kinds of deceptions when he decided to investigate how minor—and slightly misleading—shifts in headlines affect reading. Ecker's previous research focused on explicit misinformation, which occurs when biased information affects you regardless of later knowledge. He wanted to see if nuance and slight deception might work this time.

Ecker had participants in the USA read either factual or opinion items, with the only variable being the headline, in a series of tests published this month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. (He had his subjects read four articles in total—two factual and two opinions.) For example, one true piece discussed a 0.2 percent increase in burglary rates over the last year, which contrasted with a 10 percent drop over the previous decade. The slight increase, as the article pointed out, was an outlier; the longer trend was what mattered. "Number of burglaries increasing up" and "Downward trend in burglary rate," respectively, were the headlines that highlighted the lesser or greater of the two trends. The opinion articles compared the viewpoints of experts and laypeople—for example, one piece compared a citizen's fears about the safety of genetically modified foods to the viewpoint of a scientist from the fake business Organic Food Science Australia. One of the two sides was the subject of the headline. It said either "GM foods may offer long-term health hazards" or "GM foods are safe" in this circumstance. All four articles were read by each participant.

Ecker wanted to see if the degree of slant made a difference. The deception was clear in the factual item—the entire piece was about a larger pattern, with one little departure. It was considerably more subtle in the opinion piece. The essay was first and foremost an expression of opinion, with each voice given its own place; it was up to the reader to decide how the various viewpoints should be weighed.

Students from the University of Califonia scored each article on a five-point scale after reading it to assess factors such as interest and readability. After a student had finished reading all of the items, she was surprised with a six-question quiz that included both remembrance and inference questions.

It turned out that the headline had done more than simply reframe the article. In the case of factual articles, a misleading headline makes it difficult for readers to remember the details of the article. That is, the parts that aligned with the headline, such as a lower burglary rate, were easier to recall than the opposite, non-headlined trend. Inferences, on the other hand, remained sound: the misdirection was obvious enough that readers noticed it and corrected their impressions accordingly. "No matter which headline they viewed, they projected that the crime rate will go down next year," according to the study.

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