Placebo

As promised, here is an explanation of my post from yesterday, which you may or may not have read.

I was online during my break yesterday, and had noticed someone commented on a post without having actually read said post--it was pretty obvious. I complained about this to a coworker, and he mentioned that people have done experiments/pulled "pranks" to see if people will actually read posted articles or just react to the title. He went on to say that people are by nature reactionary, and that I should do a similar "experiment" on my blog. And so I did.

The results were interesting. I posted my article on several different pages/groups/threads to see what different results I might get. On a thread belonging to Joshua Feuerstein's page, a web user called me stupid for thinking that abortion should be legal. (Mind you I threw them a bone on the post, blatantly suggesting in the comment that they should make sure to read the actual article for an explanation). I posted to a Psychology group on Google+ and received no comments, just "likes"--by that I can assume that either a. Everyone read the article or b. Some did and some didn't, but the ones who didn't simply "liked" the post because they agreed. Moving on--I also posted to an Atheist group on Google+, some people commented that they agreed with the post, some said that they liked what I did with the post, and some made it clear that they had read the post but offered an opinion anyway (nothing wrong with that!)

Research on web use posits that even if content of an article is sought in the first place, only about 20-30% is actually read--in addition, web users will oftentimes pick out key words and "scan" rather than read each word in a sentence.

I think the biggest takeaway from this experiment is that we all (myself included) need to make sure we're truly thinking about all the details of what we're reading. In addition, I believe I have another experiment in mind (though I won't be implementing it for a long time).

Eh what the heck. If you got to this point in the article, comment "tufted titmouse" or something equally random/ridiculous.