1/🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 In what is likely the most fun study of my PhD, I am excited to share new work with @natematias.bsky.social about what makes news headlines most effective at grabbing reader attention. Let’s dive in to the science behind clickbait 🧵👇 - ThreadSky

mariannealq.bsky.social • 55 days ago

1/🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 In what is likely the most fun study of my PhD, I am excited to share new work with @natematias.bsky.social about what makes news headlines most effective at grabbing reader attention. Let’s dive in to the science behind clickbait 🧵👇

Comments

peck.phd•53 days ago

📌

rajmovva.bsky.social•55 days ago

I like the "information gap" intuition, that's a very clean finding! Congrats :)

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

Thanks Raj, it so rarely works out that way!

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

2/ Headline writers regularly bank on “curiosity gap” headlines to drive engagement: headlines that purposefully obscure information to create a sense of mystery and incite more clicks. But do these actually work?

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

3/ The scientific evidence was split – some studies found that using linguistic curiosity features like using pronouns or numbers in headlines could increase clicks, while others actually found negative effects.

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

4/ So, we went back to the original concept of the “information gap” from the psychology of curiosity. Information gap theories suggests that people are most curious in medium-information environments: when some information, but not all, is available.

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

5/ To test this theory in a news context, we tagged nearly 9,000 real headline experiments with a novel automated concreteness measure that labels how much specific information a headline reveals. As it turns out, both vague and overly detailed headlines perform worse.

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

6/ Headlines that strike a balance—revealing just enough to spark curiosity—get the most clicks. This suggests a "Goldilocks effect" where revealing the right amount of information maximizes engagement.

These findings also harmonize prior conflicting findings, and tie back to the information gap.

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

7/ Excited to share this work and make the concreteness measure publicly available for other researchers!

Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-81575-9
Website: http://concreteness.mariannealq.com/
Concreteness measure: https://github.com/maubinle/sentence_concreteness

jeremydfoote.com•55 days ago

Congrats!!

Looks really interesting. A quick question after a skim - in these experiments, a given subject only sees one headline?

Why compare the average concreteness of other headlines in the experiment rather than just the concreteness score for a given headline?

jeremydfoote.com•55 days ago

Is it because this sort of controls for topic and external information level, etc.?

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

Thanks Jeremy! Good question — we included average concreteness in an experiment as an interaction term to test whether headline concreteness has different effects at high vs low levels of concreteness for the same article. As you said, this helps control topic, date, different images, etc.

mariannealq.bsky.social•55 days ago

By modeling average concreteness, we can show that when all headlines are generally vague, increasing concreteness predicts more clicks. When all headlines are more concrete, increasing concreteness eventually predicts fewer clicks.

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