A study released today has urged readers of online news sources to “just read the headline and get angry”, insisting that it’s up to 50 times healthier to do so.
The study recommends that people using websites and newspapers who just read the headline are better able to “form false opinions based on very little information and express indignation”.
“You can make uninformed, snap judgements quicker than if you had to read the whole article,” the study suggests. “You’ll save time on actually digesting what you’re reading and reaching an informed conclusion if you just read the headline instead before gasping and sharing the article or leaving a shocked comment.”
“Not reading the full article,” the study says, “will leave people even more time to comment underneath articles that they’ve neither read nor fully understand.”
“Some of the comments you can leave by just reading the headline can express disbelief at the content, or shock, or outright outrage” continued the study. “There’s a whole range of avoidable and unnecessarily embittered emotions that you can express by just reading the headline and taking what it says at face value.”
All of the reactions, insists that study, are perfectly healthy responses in people suffering from the mild confusion brought about by only focusing on the headline and not the full article.
“It’s better making snap judgements,” continued the study. “People who read the full article are wasting precious milliseconds understanding what’s being written and picking up on the nuance and complexity both of what is written and the world around them by asking pertinent questions like ‘where is the source of this information’ or ‘doesn’t this study sound a bit vague considering no other information has been provided about it whatsoever?'”
“Asking questions like these,” concluded the study, “is a waste of brain power and people who read the whole article are only likely to pick up on grammtical errors and msitakes”, but that those who don’t read all the way down can save brain energy on important things like “looking mindlessly at objects and wanting to buy them, grunting to your mates about perceived slights and scraping your knuckles along the ground”.
