There are lots of things that I am sick of seeing on the internet. For instance, stories about the Kardashians, people advocating for Donald Trump, and most recently the “Science says” articles.
You know, the ones with the headlines that start with “Science Says” or the ones with a headline that ends with “According to Science.” I’m all for science and new scientific discoveries, but most of the time I’m seeing things like “Science Says Your Eye Color Will Determine How Successful You Are” or “Dating Someone That Studied a Different Major Than You Will End Badly, According to Science.”
Again, that’s great if science is really saying those things, but what really gets me is that at the end of these articles you get hit with something like this:
“But of course, this may not be true at all and actually success may not be determined by your eye color, and oh yeah you can have a successful or unsuccessful major with anyone despite their education and what they studied!”
These articles are not scientific journals, or 50 plus pages of published work done by actual scientists, these are the articles that stem from reading one sentence of something online and then completely falsifying the science behind it—if there even is science behind it, of course.
We all see the headlines about eating eggs and how one headline says it’s good and the other says that it’s bad, and then when you read each story you get the same information from each, and again, at the end you see the “well actually everything I just wrote about may or may not be true.”
In no way am I discrediting science, but rather I am no longer going to be clicking on any headline from a non-science based website that is claiming something that “science says”. If we as a society really want to find information out about something like that, we should be reading an actual published study, beginning to end, instead of headlines where the content is just pulling out information that people are interested in but are completely taken out of original context, often leading to confusion, and nothing gained from reading it.
Chances are, when you read an article with a headline like that, you weren’t searching for it to begin with. Most likely, you were scrolling through Facebook and saw it on your timeline and decided to click, because let’s face it, nothing is more enticing than an article with a headline that relates to you with facts backed up by science.
If, on the off chance that maybe you are searching for something backed up by science, actually read a full study, not just tiny snippets of some on news platforms that only pick and choose items to make their work seem more enticing, rather than painting the whole picture with all of the truth behind it, even if it is boring, or even if it something that people won’t want to hear.
Let’s leave the science to the scientists, and give them and their work both the credit they deserve, instead of botching up their hard earned data with misleading headlines and articles.
