[HN Gopher] Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the...
___________________________________________________________________
Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of
the source
Author : rustoo
Score : 130 points
Date : 2020-12-30 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hu-berlin.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hu-berlin.de)
| nathias wrote:
| Imagine that, negation of a negative has in practice no
| consequence.
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| "nlp works"
| shanemlk wrote:
| You were able to condense my comment from 29 words to 2. Nice
| job.
| stingblue wrote:
| It may be that believing what we hear / see is an evolutionary
| survival trait, a built-in cognitive default. I think this
| because the young of ancient humans had a FAR better chance of
| survival if they believed their elders. Examples: don't play in
| those woods or you may get eaten; don't eat THOSE pretty berries
| or you will get sick and maybe die; here is how you hunt or
| harvest food; and so on.
|
| It is hard to overcome this natural tendency, and without
| education and effort and a wide variety of sources one can be
| pretty easily deceived and brainwashed.
| firebaze wrote:
| Humans are 1-2 orders of magnitude more influenced by habit
| instead of genetic predisposition. There are plenty of sources
| for that argument.
|
| In other words: educate your children, peers and acquaintances
| how to escape emotional headlines a.k.a. clickbait. I know you
| know.
| shanemlk wrote:
| Basically they hooked gizmos to peoples' brain and found if they
| force people to read emotional words, their brain indeed feels
| some impact... cool. Thanks for that, great read.
| nerdponx wrote:
| _The subjects ' brain activity was recorded using an
| electroencephalogram (EEG) while they made judgments about the
| individuals. Fast, involuntary brain responses can be
| distinguished here from slower, more controlled responses. The
| researchers had expected the latter to involve consideration of
| the source's credibility in addition to emotion, and thus that
| credibility might factor into people's judgments, whereas emotion
| should dominate in early and more involuntary responses. However,
| both late and early brain responses showed dominant influences of
| headline emotionality independent of credibility._
|
| In the spirit of being critical even when we want to agree with
| or believe the conclusion: how "good" are these EEG studies?
|
| I recall some scandal several years ago in which fMRI data was
| being promoted as far more useful than it really was, due to some
| buggy clustering software and maybe also p-hacking.
|
| Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know
| they are valid?
| guenthert wrote:
| > Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we
| know they are valid?
|
| It's a new study, so no-one had the opportunity to reproduce
| their findings yet. Generally in the scientific community, one
| tries to find the flaw in their argument/methods, rather then
| presuming them to be faulty.
|
| It doesn't seem like a very complicated, time consuming or
| costly experiment (compared with e.g. the search for the higgs
| boson), so I'd think it's reasonable to expect another team to
| reproduce the results in the near future, if there is
| sufficient interest.
| nerdponx wrote:
| My question was more about the EEG method in general. Even if
| this one result is new, surely this method has been used many
| times in the past.
|
| So no, I am not just assuming the study is faulty. I am
| asking a specific question about the validity of one of the
| core study methods.
| canadaduane wrote:
| > compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson
|
| Understatement of the month, haha. I don't suppose you debate
| in engineering circles?
| guenthert wrote:
| I do, but perhaps not very well ;-}
|
| I mentioned the search for the higgs boson only as it
| leaves me uneasy, that it was so expensive, that I doubt in
| my lifetime any team will attempt to reproduce the results.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| crmd wrote:
| The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative
| content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I
| love, if a video shows up in my feed:
|
| * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb
| $something
|
| * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb
| $something
|
| * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason
|
| Then I simply don't click on it.
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-
| wo...
| smt88 wrote:
| But you've already read it, even if you don't click, so hasn't
| it already affected you?
| firebaze wrote:
| Can't agree more. Any headline which invokes a "what, really?"
| response should not be clicked, instead the keywords (like
| $villain or $unflattering_third_person or
| $unique_despicable_action) should be searched (for pro's, in a
| private window via DuckDuckGo or if that sucks (like, most of
| the time)) with google (may involve skipping the first, second
| or even third page of results for _hot_ clickbait topics).
|
| With some luck there'll be a really credible secondary, or even
| better, the primary source. Those usually come without
| clickbait headlines.
|
| This is much better that an ad-blocker, since it doesn't
| increase click count for the attention-seeking clickbait news
| provider, and yields no money for them. In the long run, this
| drains their money stream. At least I hope so.
|
| It is also simple enough to understand and follow to pass over
| to most non-IT-friends and acquaintances.
| gryfft wrote:
| I use the same rubric but go one step further and tell YouTube
| not to recommend any videos from that channel.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| Have attempted to do this with recommendations for 30-120s
| clips with 500,000 to 2,000,000 views from old TV shows,
| cartoons, and movies. It's not working.
|
| I'd rather read a spreadsheet with a list of public YouTube
| video IDs/metadata than experience the silence in the
| downtime between worthwhile videos.
| onlyreply wrote:
| the sky is blue regardless whether you agree or not
| dirkt wrote:
| For me, the impact ist mostly "no, I don't want to read this if
| the headline is already that bad".
| ianhorn wrote:
| It's so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that
| people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial
| practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like
| journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content
| than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers
| express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is
| optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they
| prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between
| their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project
| themselves as having.
|
| One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything.
| And then be paid for it. Journalism ultimately is this: it
| launders views you have so that you can express them as if they
| were consensus views and also, it takes outrageous positions so
| that you can describe yourself in opposition.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines_
|
| No. "Revealed preference" is exploitation of vice, plain and
| simple. Addicts might honestly say they would prefer to
| abstain, but still relapse. The same dopamine systems are
| being exploited in either case.
| qsort wrote:
| That's a distinction without a difference. An addict who
| _says_ they prefer to abstain but doesn 't, doesn't
| _actually_ prefer to abstain.
|
| Where preferences come from is irrelevant. De gustibus non
| disputandum est.
| nitrogen wrote:
| This is conflating desires/aspirations/preferences with
| basic drives.
|
| Everyone has base instincts that we inherited through
| evolution, and more evolutionarily recent executive
| control that we have to exercise and develop. "Revealed
| preference" tends to manipulate the base instinct at the
| expense of executive control.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It persists in order to get people to read the paper. This is
| openly acknowledged in the industry
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-
| ne... ); headline writers are aiming to "[create] a mystery
| that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw
| in as many people as possible", while making sure they don't
| "give away the ending". Journalistic integrity isn't as strong
| of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write
| headlines.
| ianhorn wrote:
| > Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply
| because it's not the journalists who write headlines.
|
| Shouldn't it still concern them? If I wrote a piece about
| Obama making a hard choice to fund orphanages or schools and
| it got a headline "Obama yanks funding from orphans" then I'd
| be pissed. Journalistic integrity of headlines needs to at
| least be _somebody's_ concern.
| Natales wrote:
| Although as a non-expert, the methodology of the study seems
| sound to me, I find its conclusion depressing.
|
| I know it wasn't their intent to attempt to provide solutions,
| but it bothers me having absolutely no idea how to even begin to
| solve this problem at scale, in a world where it's becoming
| easier and cheaper to influence such large amounts of people.
| Every single idea I've thought can either be defeated, exploited,
| or ignored, and I haven't seen a project or effort that seems
| strong enough to go to battle for.
|
| Has anyone here seen something worth exploring?
| m463 wrote:
| I find the new york times sort of annoying now.
|
| I like them and even set up a script to pull down the homepage as
| a .pdf each day to read it. Today's would be:
| https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/12/30/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf
|
| But I found the articles I generally read (mostly links from hn)
| have a different quality than the front page.
|
| The front page articles seem emotional. They seem opinionated.
| Bit they're not marked "opinion"
|
| Even if I agree with the opinion, I think they could take the
| high road.
| johncena33 wrote:
| Lot of traditional liberal media including NYT have resorted to
| yellow journalism. This is probably because of advent of
| internet. But that doesn't absolve them from the wrong-doings.
| Lot of published articles are "technically true", but
| intentionally misleading. Lot of articles are very clearly
| politically motivated, but packaged under the guise of some
| good cause. The identity politics born in universities and made
| mainstream by Twitter has essentially ended ethical journalism
| and gave birth to activist journalism.
| adameast1978 wrote:
| It has a lot of impact on me even if I try to ignore because I
| see so much sharing of misinformation and sources that are not
| even close to credible. It is especially troubling when it is
| from people I trust and respect and it takes a lot of self
| control to ignore and move along as I know arguing online about
| these things online hardly ever improves the situation.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| It's a pity that there's really no social norm to penalise
| sharing non-credible information/misinformation.
| graycat wrote:
| > penalize???
|
| Due to _bad_ content, I flatly refuse to go to Web sites of
| ABC, ..., WaPo. E.g., if there is a post at Hacker News from
| the NYT,
|
| ===>> NO WAY <<===
|
| will I go there. Same for The Guardian, the BBC, etc. Fool me
| once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Bad media has
| fooled me way, WAY too often, and I will NOT go back. I just
| conclude, bluntly, fooling people is all they know how to do.
| But they aren't fooling me anymore.
|
| It's worse than that: For many years I got _triple play_
| Internet access -- Internet, landline phone, and TV. And my
| house had three nice TV sets. But I NEVER used the TV (except
| for movies on VCR). The _triple play_ was cheaper than just
| Internet and landline phone access.
|
| What happened was, I clicked through all the TV channels
| looking for something worth watching and finding nothing once
| too often and flatly, absolutely, positively, totally gave up
| on all of TV. All of it. Now I have no TV set at all.
|
| From me, ALL of TV has been _penalized_ , totally. And nearly
| all of the mainstream media sources have been equally
| penalized.
|
| What do I pay attention to? Hacker News for one: I get good
| links to good content and the often good comments on that
| content from Hacker News readers who post.
|
| For the issue of images and video, notice that Hacker News
| has none of that! Fine with me!
|
| For more? Sure, a few selected blogs and YouTube channels.
|
| In total, there are a lot of good URLs just on Hacker News!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-12-30 23:00 UTC)