Studies show that people who click on this link are 50% less likely to tell their friends misleading information!
Disclaimer: I totally made up that statistic for this article.
My name is Sue, and I’m a junior in Pauli Murray College at Yale and one of the new undergraduate fellows working with Women’s Health Research at Yale. Earlier this month, I was one of those people who skimmed a headline and internalized information that was quite a bit less than 100% accurate.
Scrolling through my Facebook feed, a link that someone shared popped out at me. It was an article about a new study claiming that any alcohol consumption is bad for your health. I didn’t think much of it, just thought to myself, “Hm, I guess it’s good that I don’t drink,” before my fingers automatically scrolled to the next post featuring dog pictures on my feed.
The study or what it actually concluded never crossed my mind until a meeting I had at WHRY, where my mentors pushed me to think about my thought process internalizing that information as true. Turns out, if I had actually read the study or a well-reported article about it, I would have found out that the conclusion to the study wasn’t as sweeping or significant as how the headline made it seem.
We are inundated with information every second. From The New York Times to the Washington Post, the Guardian or Buzzfeed, Reddit or my Instagram “Explore” page, it’s getting harder to decipher what’s real and what’s fake. Or even what is well-intentioned but simply misleading or mistakenly false. When I was reflecting on what I wanted to do with this blog, I kept thinking back to this problem of troublesome headlines and clickbait articles. How can I compete with the ever-flowing stream of articles that aim to grab you for a second, even at the expense of accurate analysis?
This year, I hope to use this blog as an honest reflection of my journey parsing through the field of women’s health research — whether it be through investigating its history, decoding scientific studies, or interviewing faculty and peers who are at the forefront of this work. I’m no expert on women’s health, but I strive to conduct careful research and extract the verified facts that I encounter, so that I can be better able to present clear and fair information to you.
Following Dhiksha’s amazing work on this blog is no small task. But I hope you will be willing to click into my adventures taking on the field of women’s health research. And hopefully, I will be able to assist you in telling your friends accurate information from the world of research.
