The effects of subtle misinformation in news headlines.

Abstract

Information presented in news articles can be misleading without being blatantly false. Experiment 1 examined the effects of misleading headlines that emphasize secondary content rather than the article's primary gist. We investigated how headlines affect readers' processing of factual news articles and opinion pieces, using both direct memory measures and more indirect reasoning measures. Experiment 2 examined an even more subtle type of misdirection. We presented articles featuring a facial image of one of the protagonists, and examined whether the headline and opening paragraph of an article affected the impressions formed of that face even when the person referred to in the headline was not the person portrayed. We demonstrate that misleading headlines affect readers' memory, their inferential reasoning and behavioral intentions, as well as the impressions people form of faces. On a theoretical level, we argue that these effects arise not only because headlines constrain further information processing, biasing readers toward a specific interpretation, but also because readers struggle to update their memory in order to correct initial misconceptions. Practical implications for news consumers and media literacy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Web Third-Person Effect Hypothesis: Do likes and Shares Affect Users’ Perceptions?

“…Headlines are still the primary communication method for news articles. Headlines' features such as their compact and clear nature make an immediate impression on readers and the results of the aforementioned research offer evidence that headlines affect the overall processing of information about an article (Ecker et al, 2014). All the above are associated with the text and consequently, may explain to an extent the finding that text was the most salient factor.…”

“…In the same vein, feedback to article may depend on the appeal of the article (Bastos, 2014). A recent study by psychologists found that misleading headlines have a significant effect on readers' memory for news articles as well as their inferential reasoning (Ecker et al, 2014). Headlines are still the primary communication method for news articles.…”

Proceedings of the 2017 EMNLP Workshop: Natural Language Processing meets Journalism

“…As Ecker et al (2014) highlight, this headline misleads the reader by overstating the claim made later in the article. First, omitting 'environmental' from the headline radically generalises the claim: a leading environmental cause may not be the leading cause, above all other causes.…”

“…although air pollution increases the risk of developing lung cancer by a small amount, other things have a much bigger effect on our risk, particularly smoking"), these nuances are lost in the headline. This seems particularly dangerous in the light of experimental work into reader behaviour: Ecker et al (2014) show that even after reading the article in full, a reader is likely to be left with their initial impression gained from the headline; and Gabielkov et al (2016) found that c.60% of shared URLs on Twitter are not clicked on before sharing, suggesting that in many cases only headlines are read. Automatic detection of these misleading cases could therefore directly impact the spread of misinformation.…”

“…In this paper we highlight a specific problem within this realm, that of headline incongruence, show that it is distinct from problems considered within NLP so far, and discuss how it might be approached. Consider (1), taken from the Express UK online newspaper 1 (Ecker et al, 2014):…”