Read Past the Headline
MinutesOpen and read the piece before you react to it or pass it on, because headlines are written to be clicked and shared, routinely claim more than the article supports, and shape what you remember even after you have read the correction in paragraph six.
How to do it
- 1Make it a rule with no exceptions: no sharing, quoting, or arguing about anything you have not opened.
- 2Read at least to the first sentence that gives the source of the claim (the study, the document, the named person). Note how the claim is worded there compared with the headline.
- 3Look for the downgrade words that headlines drop: "may", "in mice", "one study", "preliminary", "according to a lawsuit", "critics say".
- 4Check whether the headline is a question. If the honest answer in the article is "no" or "unknown", the headline was the payload.
- 5Restate the article in one sentence of your own. If your sentence is weaker than the headline, share your sentence, not theirs.
- 6If you catch yourself reacting strongly to a headline alone, that is the signal to read rather than the signal to post.
What to say
- “Did you read the piece, or just the headline? What does it actually say the evidence is?”
- “The headline says "proves"; the article says "one small study suggests". I am going with the article.”
When to use it
- •Any link encountered in a feed, a group chat, or a notification.
- •Science, health, crime, and economic stories where the finding is more qualified than the title.
- •Screenshots of headlines circulated without a link.
- •When a headline makes a person or group you dislike look exactly as bad as you expected.
Counters
Evidence and how strong it is
Gabielkov et al. (2016) matched a month of Twitter shares of links from five major news outlets against click logs and found that about 59 percent of the shared links were never clicked at all: most sharing happens on the headline alone. Ecker et al. (2014) showed experimentally that a headline which is technically accurate but emphasizes a minor or misleading aspect of a story biases readers' memory and inferences even when they read the full article, because the headline sets the frame that the body is then fitted into. Evidence strength: good observational evidence that headline-only sharing is the norm, and experimental evidence that misleading headlines distort understanding. The remedy itself (reading the piece) is logical and recommended by media-literacy curricula, but Ecker et al. imply its limit: reading reduces the headline's effect without fully erasing it.
- Reading the article does not fully undo a slanted headline. Deliberately restate the finding in your own words to replace the frame, rather than assuming that reading was enough.
- A full article can be as misleading as its headline. This step tells you what is being claimed; it does not tell you whether the source is reliable (see lateral reading).
- Do not reward the trick. If the body does not support the headline, avoid quote-posting it with a rebuttal, which spreads the headline to people who will not read your rebuttal either.
- Gabielkov, M., Ramachandran, A., Chaintreau, A., & Legout, A. (2016). Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Science, 179-192The finding that a majority of news links shared on Twitter were never clicked.
- Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Chang, E. P., & Pillai, R. (2014). The Effects of Subtle Misinformation in News Headlines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20(4), 323-335Experiments showing that misleading headlines bias memory and inference even among people who read the whole article.