The Internet is a noisy place. Provocative headlines bombard your feed from all sides. But why click on one article while browsing dozens of others? We know that drama, conflict and disaster are striking. That’s old news. However, new findings show that negative words in the headline can get clicks, even if the content of the article is positive. Researchers have precisely determined how much more likely negative headlines are to be clicked on than positive headlines.
The old saying “If it bleeds, it leads” has long held sway in English-language journalism. Stories of bloodshed and tragedy sell better than good news. But the internet has changed things. Publishers no longer just sell whole newspapers. Sell clicks on individual articles. Journalists have to be like hawkers, using provocative headlines to get attention. It’s not just interesting for them to learn which expressions are effective. It’s profitable.
The Upworthy Experiment
Upworthy.com is an American news website that focuses on positive stories. The site has experimented with headlines for years to help sell these stories. Sometimes they published the exact same article under four different names. Next, they watched at which ones got the most clicks.
Claire Robertson and her team at New York University saw an opportunity in this data. They consider Upworthy experiments to be a massive dataset. The team analyzed more than 105,000 headlines on the site. These headlines generated over 370 million clicks. The goal is clear. They wanted to isolate how emotional language affects user behavior. How do positive and negative keywords affect CTR?
Negative words increase engagement
The results are clear. For medium-length headlines, each additional negative word increases the click-through rate by 2.3%. This also applies to milder negative words such as “wrong”, “bad” and “terrible”.
Consider two headlines that refer to the same article. It read: “If the numbers 4 and 20 mean anything to you, you want to hear this shit.” Another article says, “He explains why the question ‘What do you smoke?’ is actually pretty important,” which is actually quite important. “The version with the negative word were clicked on significantly more often. For most readers, the word ‘crap’ was enough to push most readers toward the first option.”
The opposite is also true. Positive words hurt clicks. Using positive words in the title reduces clicks by about 1%. Words like “love,” “pretty,” and “pretty” fall into this category. Emotional headlines that convey joy are less likely to be clicked. However, sadness resonates much better with readers. As for anger, the results were inconclusive.
The Evolutionary Root of Click Behavior
Why do we prefer negative headlines? Robertson and her colleagues believe this trend reflects a interestingdamental aspect of human cognition. We are wired to pay attention to negative stimuli. This bias appears in childhood and persists into adulthood.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. If a Paleolithic ancestor admired the a beautiful flower and ignored the saber-toothed cats lurking in the bushes, their lineage ended. Negative stimuli often signal immediate threats to life or safety. Positive stimuli are usually less urgent. That’s why we weigh … more heavily negative information. This ancient survival mechanism still dictates which online news stories we choose to read today.
