<story><title>Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source</title><url>https://www.hu-berlin.de/en/press-portal/nachrichten-en/december-2020/nr-201221</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crmd</author><text>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:&lt;p&gt;* with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something&lt;p&gt;* with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something&lt;p&gt;* a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason&lt;p&gt;Then I simply don’t click on it.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.vice.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;zme97a&amp;#x2F;inside-the-strange-world-of-youtube-thumbnails&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.vice.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;zme97a&amp;#x2F;inside-the-strange-wo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source</title><url>https://www.hu-berlin.de/en/press-portal/nachrichten-en/december-2020/nr-201221</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The subjects&amp;#x27; 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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of being critical even when we want to agree with or believe the conclusion: how &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; are these EEG studies?&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid?</text></comment>