The World Wants You to be Stupid: The Headline Fallacy!

Believing everything you read is a bad idea. But what’s much, much worse is believing everything you read when you don’t take the time to read all that much…

You may have seen a story last week that had the following headline:

Man Fired for Wearing Packers Tie

I don’t know about you, but when I see that headline, I assume that

1. A man wore a Packers tie to work
2. That was the reason he got fired.

I have a vision of a dude walking into work with a tie, his boss seeing it, and yelling, “You’re fired!” Like a ridiculous Donald Trump caricature, which is saying a lot, since Donald Trump is already a ridiculous caricature.

Makes sense, right? (I mean, “it makes sense that I would think that’s what the story;s about.”. The firing doesn’t seem to make any sense at all).

If you continue and read the little blurbs (in the Google results) or the first sentence or two of most articles, you’ll see that the story is about a Chicago man who wore a Green Bay Packers tie to his job in Chicago the day after the Packers beat the Chicago Bears in the NFC championship game and was subsequently fired.

When I first saw that, I felt outraged. “Why are people so stupid? How can people take sports that seriously that they would fire someone for wearing a tie supporting the opposing team??”

Then I actually clicked a few of the links and read the articles, and I discovered that there was a little more to the story…

If you read more, you discover a few things:

1. The man is a car salesman. He is in a line of work where his success is very much related to his ability to not piss potential buyers off. Regardless of whether it’s a fireable offense,, it certainly seems like a bad idea.
2. The man was an employee. If you are in business for yourself and want to do things to turn off potential customers, that is entirely your decision. If you sell for someone else though, there’s more to think about than your own numbers.
3. The car dealership spent thousands of dollars on a Bears advertising campaign. It seems bad form for the dealership to have people supporting the other team when you’ve got a whole campaign around the home team.
4. The man was asked to remove the tie five times. It turns out he didn’t just walk in and his boss, immediately upon seeing him wearing a Green Bay Packers tie, said, “you’re fired!” No, he was told the tie could hurt sales and was told repeatedly to take it off.
5. He said “no” – repeatedly. I am not an employment lawyer, nor do I play one on TV,, but to me, firing an employee for refusing to follow a simple instruction that would help business seems justifiable, at least in a legal sense.

Frankly, I think both sides were in the wrong here. Wearing the tie seems to be a bad move, but he was a fan and he also said he was wearing it to honor his grandmother. Refusing to follow his boss’s instructions, however, seems to constitute insubordination, which is really dumb to do over a minor request. On the other hand, firing the guys seems a little extreme. There had to be some middle ground between firing and letting him have his way, right?

Rather than go on about the bad decisions both parties made, I’d instead like to focus on the way it was all reported.

I, for one, am starting to get sick of headlines that mislead in an effort to get people to click through or read more.

This is another case where the world wants you to be stupid

Sorry if that offends you, but if you take a course in writing copy, articles, or blog posts, you’ll see the same bits of advice over and over:

• People don’t like long blocks of text
• People like bullets
• People like sections broken up by headlines and sub-headlines
• And so on…

In short, writing is done to appease people who like scan. Headlines are designed to get a scanner to stop, take note, and click a link, buy a paper, or read more.

As such, many headlines like to “position the truth” in the most eye catching manner possible.

“Man fired for wearing Packers tie,”

Is way more enticing than

“Man fired for saying “no” to his boss five times”

This would not be a huge problem if everyone were to go on and actually read the article or get more information. But people don’t. They read the headlines and maybe the top blurb (also written for the primary purpose of hooking attention) and then move on.

You may say, “That’s crazy, people don’t do that!” But how many times have you been in a conversation with someone who quotes a fact they saw in the news or in an article., but when you ask them questions about it, it becomes clear that they just saw a headline? How many times have you done that yourself?

Frankly, in this day and age you get so overloaded with information that it’s easier to just read a headline and two sentences and assume that you have the facts. But that doesn’t make it right.

Media outlets, especially biased news and opinion shows and websites, constantly use this to their advantage. By tweaking verbiage they can walk right up to the edge of telling a lie without crossing over. They know most people will simply take what they say at face value and never dig deeper.

Don’t fall for it! Don’t get sucked in to the headline fallacy!

If you’re going to take something as true (especially if you are going to make decisions based on that belief), do your research. Read the full text. Follow up a little on big claims. Take responsibility. And don’t let people get away with wanting you to be stupid!

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By Avish Parashar. As the world's only Motivational Improviser, Avish uses techniques from the world of improv comedy to engage, entertain, and educate audiences on ideas around change, creativity, and motivation. Connect with Avish on Google+

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