<
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/negativity-bias-online-news-consumption/673499/>
"Last week, I saw a new paper in the journal
Nature Human Behavior called
“Negativity Drives Online News Consumption.” That seems bad, I thought.
Naturally, I clicked.
In a randomized study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions from a
data set of articles published by the online news dispensary
Upworthy,
researchers concluded that each negative word increased the click-through rate
by more than 2 percent. “The presence of positive words in a news headline
significantly decreases the likelihood of a headline being clicked on,” they
said.
Are you even remotely surprised by any of this? Probably not. Neither was New
York University’s Claire E. Robertson, a co-author of the paper. “People have
been saying ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ for decades,” she told me. But what does
that actually mean? Maybe substantively bad news naturally gets more attention,
as it probably should. Or, maybe, even humdrum and unimportant stories can be
juiced to attract eyes and ears if editors inject their headlines with a dose
of sadness and catastrophe.
Upworthy might seem like an unusual choice for studying the properties of
hard news, given that the site is typically associated with frivolous
curiosity-gap bait: “This Baby Panda Learned to Breakdance—What Happened Next
Will ASTONISH You,” and so on. But its database offers an unusually perfect
opportunity to test the effect of headlines on audience behavior, because the
site has made public the headline tests it ran for many news stories. This way,
Robertson and her co-authors could control for the substance of each article,
because some stories (a Harry Styles breakup, for example) will always get more
clicks than others (a new law for Vermont pension accounting, say). “Even
controlling for the same news story, framing more negatively increases
engagement,” Robertson said.
Although blaming journalists and editors for this bias is easy, it’s also too
simple. After all, it’s audiences who are reading—and watching, clicking, and
subscribing to—all this stuff. (An alternate media maxim might be “If it
bleeds, she reads.”) Even public-service-minded editors and journalists may
feel they need to shape their coverage to match the decisions and emotional
dispositions of their consumers. Negativity is not, strictly speaking, a
news-maker problem; it’s a human problem—or, more to the point, a
collective-action problem, in a dual-sided marketplace."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-nuclear-ocean-chile-climate-change-solution/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
