The Shocking Truth About Clickbait

Have you ever found yourself clicking on irresistible headlines? Maybe even during work hours?

The problem with clickbait

According to a survey conducted a few years ago, surfing the Internet for personal use is the average employee’s number-one time waster during work hours at about two hours per day. Whether it’s writing emails, interacting on social media, or reading news articles, this adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars in salaries paid for unproductive time.

The fact that many of us rely on the Internet for work as well doesn’t help, as distractions are dangled right in front of us. Take personalized internet start pages, such as the one on the Edge browser, for example. When you begin a new session, the browser will show Microsoft Start by default, which includes personalized news. If you don’t change your settings, you easily become the target of clickbait, such as articles from online tabloids (“You won’t believe what this former child star looks like now!”). They can be hard to resist. And, as we all know, once you click, you increase the chances of being served more of the same in the future.

A basic formula

Clickbait research is not exactly mainstream psychology. But it’s interesting nonetheless and a great illustration of a simple formula that explains behavior:

Behavior = Person + Stimulus + Situation

Let’s start with the individual.

Person

Each of us develops certain personality traits—dispositions that are relatively stable over time. When it comes to susceptibility to clickbait, we can think of traits in three dimensions: cognitive, emotional, and experiential.

In the cognitive realm, your curiosity is the most important disposition. There have been various approaches to understanding and defining curiosity. One of them differentiates between curiosity rooted in interest (gaining knowledge because you get intrinsic rewards) and another one that reflects deprivation (gaining information because you “need to know”).

A contemporary view of curiosity is that it’s a special kind of information-seeking drive that can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. This means that there are important roles played by you (the person) and the information or environment you find yourself in. We can expect more curious people to be more susceptible to clickbait.

The emotional dimension involves your dispositions around impulsivity and self-control. I wrote about it here quite a few years ago. Impulsivity can be functional and dysfunctional. It has also been divided into the subdimensions of planning impulsivity (being more interested in the present than the future); attentional impulsivity (being restless or having extraneous thoughts when thinking); and motor impulsivity (doing things without thinking). While impulse buying, for example, involves a fair amount of the first dimension (in the form of instant gratification), clickbait susceptibility involves more of the other dimensions. When clickbait pops up on your screen, you should be more likely to click if you lack attention (e.g., are distractable) and are predisposed to physically act quickly without thinking (e.g., are “trigger happy” with the computer mouse).

The third dimension is more experiential, including personality traits like your levels of sensation-seeking and openness to experience. Sensation-seeking involves a need for new, different, or complex experiences. Openness to experience is one of the five Big Five personality traits. Due to its link with creativity and critical thinking, openness to experience is often seen as a more intellectual trait. As such, it is also related to the conceptualization of curiosity rooted in interest, as mentioned previously. The more you seek new experiences and sensations, the more likely you should be to fall for clickbait.

Stimulus

What about the stimulus itself? In the case of news items, the clickbait you encounter usually includes three main elements: headline, image, and source. The actual bait tends to be the headline. This text is designed to trigger your natural curiosity and impulses. It creates an “information gap” that you may find difficult to resist. Classic examples are lists (e.g., “5 Reasons why Taylor Swift…”), raising questions (“Did Taylor Swift…?”), or promising answers (“Why Taylor Swift…”). I’ve used the lists approach in my own titles in this column.

Researchers found other interesting patterns in clickbait headlines. For example, the demonstrative pronoun “this” is much more frequently contained in clickbait than others (e.g., “those” or “these”). Similarly, headlines are most likely to speak to the reader directly (“you”). They also tend to make unusual comparisons by using words like “weird,” “incredible,” or “mind-blowing.”

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In terms of different kinds of content, clickbait often includes celebrity gossip, solved mysterious stories, or instances of people’s stupidity. Clearly, clickbait can backfire for readers to whom certain headlines signal undesirable (lowbrow, manipulative or inaccurate) content. However, even if you consider yourself to be a more “sophisticated” reader, you may succumb to “Six surprisingly common reasons you’re gaining weight” or “Can you solve this ancient riddle? Ninety percent of people give the wrong answer.”

Situation

The person + stimulus part of our behavioral equation shows that it takes two to tango. But there are also situational factors that are of particular interest to behavioral scientists, such as your state of mind or mood. When you are distracted, preoccupied, or under time pressure, your capacity to reflect and deliberate is limited, and you are more likely to be influenced by subtle cues or act on impulse.

Feeling happy can have a similar effect. One specific type of emotional or physical factor is known as a “hot state”—a visceral state like hunger, craving, or arousal that may compel you to satisfy your immediate needs. In the context of susceptibility to clickbait, we could perhaps stretch the hot state concept to include boredom, a state in which you may crave stimulation.

Other aspects of the situation are outside of the individual. Are you at home or at work? What is the social and physical environment you are in? What were you doing before you came across all this tempting online content?

Since it can be difficult to change people’s dispositions, and we may not have direct control over stimuli, behavioral interventions often target the situation or environment in which choices are made.

The solution

Do we need to come up with countermeasures that tackle the situation to fight clickbait? Perhaps. Naturally, an effective way to deal with the problem is to limit opportunities for you to be exposed to it in the first place. But it’s also important to bear in mind that clickbait is not inherently linked to harmful content. At best, it’s just a catchy headline. It’s worse if clickbait significantly contributes to time wasting.

At worst, it can help the spread of damaging fake news. Targeted interventions, such as “inoculation” or “prebunking” should focus on this domain of misinformation. That’s more relevant than ever in 2024, a year with a U.S. election and ongoing polycrisis, particularly those associated with global conflicts, global warming, and economic uncertainty.