Are You Listening to This Article or Reading It? It Could Make a Big Difference

Streaming audio has been a godsend for people who want to keep up with the news. Rather than sitting and reading an article, we increasingly listen to news podcasts on-demand while walking, audiobooks while cooking and audio transcriptions of news articles while driving.

But while streaming audio has clearly made news more available, does it also change our understanding of it? The answer is yes.

In my research I find that consumers who listen to news are often left with an understanding of it that is not only shallower, but also more extreme and negative compared with those who read the same story.

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When presented with a news article about the risks and benefits of a shampoo ingredient, for example, those who listened walked away believing that the ingredient was more toxic than those who read it. The differences didn’t stop there. Compared with readers, listeners were also less willing to try the product themselves or recommend it to loved ones, and when asked to describe the shampoo to other consumers, they emphasized its risks with few mentions of its benefits. 

Word processing

Why might listening to news degrade our comprehension compared with reading?

Psychologists have long known that processing information through listening—particularly more-complex narratives—isn’t always easy. When we read, if there is a word we don’t understand, or if we get momentarily distracted, we can easily pause and reread to better comprehend it. But listening rarely affords that luxury. When listening, our brain has to process a fire hose of auditory inputs, one word after another, with little control over the rate of the incoming information. It is less forgiving of momentary lapses of attention. Should we become distracted while listening, we’ve typically already fallen behind.

Luckily, humans have developed an efficient workaround for this limitation: We listen selectively. When listening to a podcast, we don’t need to encode every single word to comprehend the overall meaning; rather, we give priority to the information that’s most noteworthy or attention-grabbing.

What type of information might that be? Studies show that negative information tends to stand out to us more than positive information—a phenomenon known as the “negativity bias.” Words like “danger” and “dead,” for example, are more attention-grabbing than “safe” and “alive.”

Privileging the negative

Which brings us back to the news—something often replete with negative information. Because we listen selectively, when we hear a news story we are more susceptible to the negativity bias—that is, to attending to just its negative aspects while overlooking positive or qualifying information.

When reading, in contrast, it is easier to process content in a more balanced way. Hence, an article describing concerns about an economic downturn or the threat of a new pandemic is likely to be interpreted as more alarming when we hear it compared with when we read it. This will be even more pronounced if we listen while multitasking, such as when driving or exercising.

The notion that humans naturally pay more attention to negativity helps explain why most misinformation is negative, why it spreads across people, and why some are prone to believing it even when proven false.

My research suggests that the rise of streaming audio could be worsening these problems. Because our brains are even more attuned to negative information when listening than reading, we are more vulnerable to drawing negatively biased interpretations of news than readers of the same content. Hence, in an era of rampant misinformation, how we consume the news matters just as much as what we consume.

So, the next time you grab your headphones to listen to a news story, be aware that your ears may not be telling the whole story. In fact, you might consider whether you’d be better off reading it.

Shiri Melumad is an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.