The Power of Framing: How News Headlines Guide Search Behavior

2025-08-23

AI Summary

This study investigates how news headline framing influences users’ subsequent information-seeking behavior in search engines. Employing a controlled online experiment, we systematically compare the effects of three framing types—conflict, strategic, and narrative—on users’ search trajectories, leveraging query logs and click-through data. Results demonstrate that headline framing significantly alters the topical orientation and semantic focus of follow-up queries: conflict framing increases ideologically motivated, stance-oriented searches; strategic framing promotes solution-oriented queries; and narrative framing heightens demand for contextual and granular information. These framing effects persist robustly in the short term but attenuate over time. This work provides the first causal, empirical evidence of news framing’s impact on user information behavior within search contexts, advancing understanding of the transmission mechanism linking media discourse, user cognition, and retrieval behavior.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Search

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Headline framing effects on search behavior are not well understood
• How linguistic frames in headlines influence subsequent user queries
• Brief exposure to framing alters information-seeking direction

Innovation

• Headline framing shapes search queries
• Episodic frames produce concrete queries
• Brief exposure alters information-seeking behavior