Why Headlines Lie Without Lying: 8 Tricks Explained

You know the feeling. You tap a headline, read three paragraphs, and realize the article never said anything the headline didn’t already hint at. Nothing in it was false, exactly. You just got moved from one page to another.

I spent 30 years in marketing writing lines whose whole job was to get the click, so I know how these are built. Below are the eight moves that show up most, with a quick check for each one. At the end there’s a single habit that catches all eight.

1. The missing noun

“Doctors want you to stop eating this common food.” Which food? The headline won’t say. There’s a hole in the sentence exactly where the important word should be, and the only way to fill it is to click.

In 2016, Facebook built a filter to catch headlines like this and published real examples of what it was targeting. One of them, word for word: “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe.” That’s the missing noun in its purest form.

The check: if you can’t say what the story is about from the headline alone, the headline was built for the click.

2. The villain frame

Somebody “slams” something. Somebody “destroys” somebody. Here’s an invented example so I’m not picking on anyone real: “Celebrity chef slams the way you cook your eggs.” The actual story is a chef mentioning in an interview that he likes his eggs a little softer. The verb turned a preference into a fight, because a fight gets more clicks than a preference.

The check: swap the verb for “said.” If the story falls apart when you change one word, that word was doing all the work.

3. The question mark

“Is your morning coffee slowly killing you?” A question lets a writer put an idea in your head without having to stand behind it, and it works better than you’d think.

In a 1981 experiment, researchers showed people headlines about made-up candidates for public office. Some headlines simply asked whether a candidate was linked to wrongdoing, without claiming he was. People who saw only the question still rated that candidate worse than people who saw a neutral headline about him. A preregistered repeat of the study in 2024, with 506 people, found the same thing.

There’s an old newsroom joke that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered “no.” When people have actually counted, it isn’t that tidy, so here is the honest version.

The check: read the question mark as “we couldn’t prove yes.” If they could have, it would have been a statement.

4. The number with no base

“Cases up 200%.” That sounds like a wave. It could also mean two cases last year and six this year.

Here’s a real case of what that costs. In 1995, British regulators warned that some newer birth control pills doubled the risk of a dangerous blood clot. “Doubled” was accurate. The actual risk went from about one woman in 7,000 to about two in 7,000. Many women stopped taking the pill after the warning, and researchers later estimated roughly 13,000 additional abortions in England and Wales the following year.

The check: ask “up from what?” A percentage without its starting number hasn’t told you anything yet.

5. Nobody did it

“Mistakes were made.” “Customer data was exposed.” Something happened in both sentences, and no one did it.

That missing name changes how you judge what happened. In experiments at Stanford, people read about the same famous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. Some read that a performer ripped the costume. Others read that the costume ripped. The people who read the version with a person in it blamed him more, and they wanted him fined 30 to 50 percent more.

The check: ask who did it. If neither the headline nor the story will say, that silence is information.

6. “Experts say”

Which experts, and what were they asked? My favorite example is an ad. In 2007, Colgate ran posters in Britain claiming that more than 80 percent of dentists recommended Colgate. Britain’s advertising regulator looked at the survey behind the claim and found the dentists had been allowed to name several brands, so other brands could have scored just as high. The regulator ruled the poster misleading.

The check: look for names and the actual question asked. No names usually means you’re reading someone’s opinion in a lab coat.

7. The quote that isn’t

A headline says someone “blasted” or “warned,” then gives you two or three words in quotation marks. Those words are real, but the sentence they came from might say something different.

Movie ads have done this for decades. In 1997, a critic panned a gangster film called Hoodlum but described its lead actor as “fierce, magnetic, irresistible.” The ad ran one word: “Irresistible.” The word was real, and the meaning had flipped.

The check: find the full sentence. If the article won’t give it to you, that tells you why.

8. The local story that goes national

One thing happens in one town, and it gets written up so it feels like it’s happening everywhere. Every October, for example, parents are warned to check Halloween candy for poison from strangers.

The sociologist Joel Best has tracked those reports back to 1958 and hasn’t found a single confirmed case of a child killed or seriously hurt by a stranger’s poisoned treat. The well-known 1974 death in Texas was a father who poisoned his own son. The real danger on Halloween night is cars. A CDC analysis found that children were about four times more likely to die as pedestrians on Halloween evening than on other evenings.

The check: ask how many times this has actually happened. One story is one story.

One habit that catches all eight

Every trick above works by leaving something out. So the first move is to fill in the blank yourself: say in one plain sentence what actually happened and who did it. If you can’t, you haven’t been told yet.

Then run the three questions we use on this channel before trusting any claim.

Stake: who gains if you click? The site gets paid whether you learn anything or not.

Source: how do they know? Look for names and full sentences.

Steelman: what’s the honest reason this headline might be fair? Sometimes there is one. More often, the most boring true version of the story is the real one.

Sources

• Peysakhovich & Hendrix, Facebook Newsroom (Aug. 4, 2016). Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed.
• Wegner, Wenzlaff, Kerker & Beattie (1981). Incrimination through innuendo. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Social Psychology (2024). Preregistered replication, N = 506. DOI 10.1027/1864-9335/a000540.
• Gigerenzer et al. (2007). Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
• Furedi, A. (1999). The public health implications of the 1995 “pill scare.” Human Reproduction Update.
• Fausey & Boroditsky (2010). Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
• Advertising Standards Authority, UK (2007). Ruling on Colgate-Palmolive.
• Slate (Nov. 25, 2009). How Do Movie Blurbs Work?
• Best & Horiuchi (1985). The Razor Blade in the Apple. Social Problems; updated at joelbest.net.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1997). Childhood Pedestrian Deaths During Halloween, United States, 1975–1996. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 46(42).