Looks Can Be Deceiving...

Have you ever read an article without looking at the accompanying pictures? Read an article in the newspaper and do not look at the photographs. Then, ask a friend to read the same article and focus on the visuals.

I challenge you to do this because photos can greatly impact how you receive a message.

If you visit any online newspaper site, you will notice you can access a gallery of photographs related to the story. This would be impossible in hard copy newspapers because there is limited space. You can quickly send a message without text to a friend by sending him or her a picture taken by your phone’s built- in camera; more often than not, the picture will speak for itself.

Electronic media have undoubtedly shortened the time required for a message to be delivered. Additionally, it seems we also desire to shorten the time it takes to process the message once it's delivered by using images to depict the message. Although photographs enhance stories, we need beware of how these images affect information processing.

In 1993, Communication professors Wayne Want and Virginia Roark, conducted a study to discover readers' cognitive and “affective responses” to photos and the relating articles from different newspapers. The subjects were 204 high school students, mostly 18 year old seniors. Each student was instructed to read the front page of a newspaper and then took a quiz to test how well the student interpreted the information. Photographs that didn't complement the story hindered the reader's ability to process the information. Also, after viewing photos and related articles, the subjects tended to “underestimate future events.” Overall, the results showed when it comes to storing information, readers have a limited capacity.

Although it may save time to just read the headline of an article and then quickly surf through the photo gallery, you run the risk of interpreting an incomplete message. Wanta and Roark, state, “If people first look at the largest photo on a page, perhaps certain types of photographs help or inhibit mental processing of information.” Thus, photographs may not only provide supplemental information but could also influence how we make sense of the story.Thus, it is crucial to dedicate the time to reading an article's text in its entirety before we begin interpreting the story based on the accompanying images.



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Wanta, Wayne, and Virginia Roark. Cognitive and AFfective Responses to Newspaper Photographs. Proc. of Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communcation, 76th, Kansas. 1993. 2-41.