By Breana Staten, Opinion Editor
About two weeks ago, a photo began circulating the internet that depicted a seemingly smug high school student, Nick Sandmann, in a bright red “Make America Great Again” hat standing face to face with a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.
It didn’t take long for this photo to go viral and for people from all over the world to call out Sandmann and his classmates as being disrespectful and racist. However, soon after that, videos of the whole encounter began to circulate depicting Covington Catholic students being heckled and confronted by a Hebrew Israelite group, deeming the Covington students supposedly innocent.
In today’s climate, we undoubtedly need to be very intentional about forming opinions because our assumptions have the ability to detrimentally affect those we assume things about. In this intance, various news outlets quickly jumped to conclusions about the situation and pushed their viewpoint without assurance that their conclusions were indeed fact. This then gave their consumers the false illusion that the assumptions published were true when they were not.
One problem with this situation is that “it takes a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face and that longer exposures don’t significantly alter those impressions,” according to a study done by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov. It seems that recently, it takes about that long for media outlets to formulate and disperse the news in hopes of getting the most clicks and views instead of reviewing the full context of the story so that they can report the truth.
However, for Sandmann, it was too late. “I was being called every name in the book, including a racist,” said Sandmann in a statement published by CNN. “I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. … My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue.”
Those who bashed Sandmann trusted that the information they had was the truth, therefore causing them to believe that those initial news stories were giving them some sort of permission to insult and threaten Sandmann. When in reality, it was a nuanced situation where no one really knows what happened.
Social media has only amplified this situation by making it easy for those scrolling through Instagram and Twitter to view quick headlines and snippets of stories and not bother with understanding the full story.
An article published by the Washington Post stated that 6 in 10 people will share links without reading them, which tends to produce “people more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”
While it’s effortless for us to form beliefs about people based on headlines and underdeveloped stories, we must remember and be conscious of the fact that we cannot form opinions based on quick presumptions. At the end of the day, it is not fair to the people affected by those assumptions.
