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Clickbait headlines have been perfected over the last decade or so with the advent of social media and websites like Buzzfeed. You can hardly login to Facebook without seeing posts like this:

How about we start with arguably the most important aspect of clickbait — it’s insanely effective. Sometimes you don’t even want to click but you do, and a big reason is emotion. Most clickbait titles evoke some strong emotion — either curiosity, outrage, anger, surprise, or shock. Jonah Berger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies social influence and virality, explains that this is a critical aspect of what makes clickbait effective. Strong emotions, whether positive or negative, drive us to take action.

For instance, this recent research study looked at tens of thousands of headlines, and analyzed the headline text relative to the popularity of the article. They found that headlines which invoked any extreme emotion, whether positive or negative, results in the most popular articles:

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Interestingly, our results suggest that an headline has more chance to be successful if the sentiment expressed in its text is extreme, towards the positive or the negative side. Results suggest that neutral headlines are usually less attractive

The second psychological technique most clickbait makes use of is what George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University calls the “Information Gap” (sometimes also known as the “Curiosity Gap”). Loewenstein’s research found that, when presented with a clear gap between what they know and what they should or could know, people are driven to close the gap:

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Some research has been done that supports this. One study by Loewenstein found that curiosity (driven by things such as seeing a trivia question) activated the neural circuitry associated with rewards. Basically, your brain anticipates the “reward” of satisfying curiosity, similarly to how your brain anticipates satisfaction from eating a burrito if you’re hungry.

A followup study showed people blurry images, and saw that the brain activated regions associated with conflict and arousal. Only after the participants were shown the full-resolution images did these activation patterns die down. The findings seem to suggest that curiosity and an information gap puts us in a state of internal conflict, deeply desiring the “hit” of learning what we don’t know.

Loewenstein articulated 5 key triggers for an information gap: questions or riddles, unknown resolutions, violated expectations, access to information known by others, and reminders of something forgotten. Notice anything? These almost

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But while these brain studies are great and all, nothing shows how effective the information gap is than hard data. Here’s a look at the most popular publishers on Facebook:

Their secret? According to their CEO, it’s all about “engineering ‘curiosity gap’ headlines”. Don’t believe me? Take a look at Upworthy’s 11 “Greatest Hit” posts — they virtually all touch on the 5 triggers that Loewenstein articulated (and they all elicit some strong emotional response)

So we know emotions matter, and we know that the curiosity gap matters, but there’s more. As you very well know, lists are popular. The website Cracked was the original website that focused on lists, and since then literally every other Buzffeed and Clickhole article are lists. Why? Well — the data shows that we like and click on list articles more than almost anything else.

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What to expect. Immediately, we know about how long the article will be and about how long it will take to read. Plus, we know that as we read the article, we’ll always be able to easily gauge our progress. This relates to research on the psychology of waiting in lines — our brain perceives time waited MUCH differently if we know how long the line or queue will take vs. if we don’t.

Basically, lists seem to give the world structure, and give us mental ease. We don’t have to think too hard to read them, and so there is no cognitive burden or worry that if we click the link, we’ll have to suddenly start focusing.

Now, you might ask, “Okay, sure, clickbait employs some effective tactics to get me to click once. But, why don’t people stop clicking after they realize most clickbait is trash. Why do they get so hooked?”

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Great question, and the answer may go back to B.F. Skinner (who you likely learned about in psychology class). Skinner found that the most effective reinforcement schedule to drive long term behavior change was variable ratio reinforcement (aka, a reward that happened on average every nth time, but not

Sure, most clickbait articles are shit. But every now and again, you find the perfect article of cute puppies and love it. That’s the variable hit, and you want to keep looking until you find another.

Take the graph below. If you take monkeys, and allow them to pull some lever 10 times in order to get a reward once a light goes off (the signal), you’ll see that dopamine goes up right after the signal (the anticipation), and then drops off once they start doing the work. But, if the reward only comes 50% of the time, the dopamine response in that timeframe is almost 3x higher.

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In his words, “Maybe is addictive like nothing else out there”. And this is exactly what clickbait articles do to you. You’re so triggered to click the article (because it invoked extreme emotion, it invoked an information gap, it probably had some list), and then your dopamine shoots up because you anticipate that

Now that we know a little about how clickbait works, let’s consider the question of whether it is new? Is clickbait a result of the explosion of social media and the internet, or is it a longstanding tradition?

As you might expect, it’s the latter. William Hearst gained notoriety in the late 1800s and early 1900s for his “yellow journalism”, or his sensationalistic news articles and headlines that became extremely popular. Similarly, various newspapers made us of clickbait like articles throughout the 20th century.

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The difference today, however, is that now: 1. The psychology of virality and addiction is better understood 2. There are more and more companies vying for your attention due to the ease of publishing on the internet and 3. These companies can now track data on clicks and A/B tests like never before.

Clickbait is so bad, in fact, that companies like Facebook have had to actively write software that helped reduce its prominence. But despite that, websites like Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Clickhole and more aren’t going anywhere.

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