Headline Worldviews
One combination of Critical Thinking and Passive Information Consumers that I see a lot is the "headline worldview."
Some features:
- A "journalist1" writes a clickbait headline for a media source.
- An information consumer (IC) reads the headline.
- No one has time to intelligently filter information, so it's easier to bypass Critical Thinking. The subversion of most media towards ideologically-polarized outputs has gone largely unnoticed by people biased towards that ideology. The IC's trust in the media source leads to a benevolent assumption that the headline writer has done the right thing.
- The IC integrates the headline into their worldview.
- Buried in paragraph 15 is the actual story, and it contradicts the headline.
You cannot debate someone with headline worldviews. They have offloaded their thinking to an external source and can only repeat what they've been told. It is a Sisyphean task to get them to understand this, as typically the source ideologically conditions them to a highly-polarized state.
Breaking this
- Ask yourself, "how often do I update my worldview after only reading a headline?" The key part is not to provide an answer right away.
- Over the next week, try to be aware how often you consume information at a surface-level only, but let it enter your head as fact. As a warning, you may end up skimming the article (confusing this with reading) just to say you aren't pulling your worldview from the headline.
- A counter to this is to treat the headline as a hypothesis; when you read the article, look for evidence that does and doesn't support the headline.
- Additionally, consider the quality of your media.
Footnotes:
1
I almost always use the word journalist as a slur.