Things About Clickbait that Noone Will Tell You

Did you just click this article because of its title?

Reading this article will not stop you from ever clicking an online link or article which arouses your curiosity and interest in a way you cannot comprehend. And the same effect influences many like you who click the same link ultimately serving the purpose of the link creator more than yours. However, I think if you are reading this it will make you think more before you randomly click something or precisely get click baited.

Have you ever wondered why you or anyone falls for clickbaits? Clickbait doesn’t just happen on its own. Headlines and titles are written intentionally to manipulate you—or at least grab your attention—and they always succeed. The difference with clickbait is that you're often aware of this manipulation, and yet you are unable to resist it.

This has a lot to do with emotion and the role it plays in our daily decision-making processes. Our emotional levels are affected by the mere clicking of a clickbait, and are intimately related to the reason why we click. Clickbait articles tap into the most impulsive emotions such as rage, frustration, outrage, anger, fervour, and so on. These emotions propel us to click on the articles that we see. Emotional arousal, or the degree of physical response you have to an emotion, is a key ingredient in clicking behaviors. Sadness and anger are both negative emotions but anger is much more potent. It can drive, fire, and push us to take action. You will relate to this if you have ever read or watched a hate-mongering article or video. Clickbait writers are very clever at using humour, anxiety, anger, inspiration, excitement, surprise, and other such strong emotions in their headlines. Not only headlines, just take for example, the numerous posts crowding your LinkedIn feed. There are many of them which you will feel inspired or enraged after you read them. You already know about so many of these stories floating around or personal experiences that seem to just entertain you on a website like LinkedIn that was supposedly meant to spell pure business. Quite a few of these articles dig into your emotions to compel you to read them, appreciate them, and click like. Research has unearthed the relation between extreme emotions expressed through headlines garnering an increased number of clicks after analysing the sentiment polarity of several news articles across leading newspapers. It concluded that strongly negative or positive news along with their respective headlines succeed in attracting more readers.

Apart from emotions, another aspect that works for clickbait is our curiosity and information gap. When human beings encounter a gap between the information they know and the information they want to know their emotions compel them to fill that knowledge gap. In the mid-1990s, Loewenstein came up with what he called the "information-gap" theory. It basically holds that whenever we perceive a gap “between what we know and what we want to know,” that gap has emotional consequences. "Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity," he wrote. "The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation." You can make people even more curious, say social psychologists, by presenting them with something they know a little bit about, but not too much. This is explicit in articles which are titled in this structure: ‘So and so happened, read what happened next’ or ‘So and so happened, you won’t believe what they did after’, ‘So and so, know all you need to know’.

Providing numbers in a title also helps us think spatially rather than in terms of infinity. For example, ‘Top 10 ways to do…’, ‘5 ways you were proved wrong when…’. Numbers stand out in a feed pretty explicitly, they also quantify the length of the story and eliminate the illusion of uncertainty.

But even if readers rely on emotion and cognitive ease when choosing headlines, that still doesn't explain why clickbait continues to work. Fool-me-once logic should mean that their effectiveness goes down as exposure goes up. How many cheap emotional ploys, false promises, and empty listicles and quizzes can a person endure? A lot, it turns out.

Research has shown that humans are quite willing to put up with massive amounts of disappointment and frustration so long as there's an occasional payout. And yes, sometimes clickbait does deliver these payouts in the form of cute videos with cute titles. It’s as if Dopamine hits our body to give us pleasure just like eating sugar, having sex, or watching something awfully cute. So, acting on clickbait becomes more an anticipation of pleasure than pleasure itself.

So even though clickbait really plays on our emotions mostly, falling into its trap will wane when we get rewarded less on our anticipation or even ponder on the value of taking the bait over and over, again and again as most of these do not really change our lives or add anything substantial to our intellectual experiences.