The Power of Framing: How News Headlines Guide Search Behavior
This addresses the problem of subtle media influences on information-seeking for search engine users, though it is incremental in extending known framing effects to search behavior.
The study tackled how news headline framing influences users' search behavior, finding that conflict and strategy frames disrupted query alignment while episodic frames led to more concrete queries, with modest short-term persistence.
Search engines play a central role in how people gather information, but subtle cues like headline framing may influence not only what users believe but also how they search. While framing effects on judgment are well documented, their impact on subsequent search behavior is less understood. We conducted a controlled experiment where participants issued queries and selected from headlines filtered by specific linguistic frames. Headline framing significantly shaped follow-up queries: conflict and strategy frames disrupted alignment with prior selections, while episodic frames led to more concrete queries than thematic ones. We also observed modest short-term frame persistence that declined over time. These results suggest that even brief exposure to framing can meaningfully alter the direction of users information-seeking behavior.