No Room For Good News In The Human Mind

Michael Hedges March 20, 2023 - Follow on Twitter

Publishers have been fighting for attention since time immemorial. Headlines make the difference and are hardly an afterthought. Giving a potential reader the sense of an article in ten or twelve words and motivate them to keep reading is certainly an art. Typically, it’s the job of an editor rather than an author buried in details. The secrets are passed down from one generation to another. Then they change.

As will happen with weighty questions a group of social scientists - economics and psychology to neuroscience and management - embraced the contemporary challenge faced by editors and authors: what drives online news consumption? Their peer-reviewed study and analysis was published in Nature Human Behavior (March 16). The dataset was collected by Upworthy, a notable online content aggregator that provides content optimization insights to social media portals. Upworthy data influenced Facebook algorithms.

Both positive and negative words are found in headlines, about 90% the data showed. And positive words appear slightly more often. But click through rate (CTR) is affected differently. Negative words in headlines appear to cause CTR to rise, while positive words have the opposite effect. Tabloid editors know this. The researchers made a point that online traffic to Upworthy has declined over time and suggested its ‘clickbait’ practices were more popular when it was a new kid on the block.

At the heart of the research is previous learning that human learning is based “foundationally” on negative experiences. “Negative information may be more ‘sticky’ in our brains; people weigh negative information more heavily than positive information, when learning about themselves, learning about others and making decisions.” Children are warned about what not to do, like sticking fingers in electric light plugs. In the post-modern age, obviously, some people think this is unfair.

Longer headlines with less complex construction, said the report, are “appealing to users and lead to higher levels of news consumption.” The researchers presented to subjects as many a five differently written headlines for each article. When the articles - with headlines - were presented by subject, lighter material - entertainment, for example - benefitted with higher CRT than heavier matter, like government and economics. On top of that, subjects tinged with controversy - LGBT and parenting - earned higher CRT with headlines that included negative words.

Of course, there is an emotional component. Expressed in a headline, sadness significantly increased CRT while joy resulted in the reverse. Fear and anger, however, led to increased online sharing, which the authors noted as public, “signalling group identity” and “maintaining reputation.” They also noted that sharing content is not the same as consuming content. “Generally, people share only a fraction of the content they consume online, implying that engagement may be driven by different emotions and goals. These different motivations may make ‘fear’ and ‘anger’ more influential in the decision to share, compared with the decision to consume.”

The research, they said in the reports’ conclusion, was meant to shed greater light on “the biases that influence people’s consumption of online content… especially as misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories proliferate online.” News consumption is nuanced, negativity not entirely bad. Making “articles interesting to people is a necessary first step… and will enable us to increase online literacy and to develop transparent online news practices.”

Publishers are interested, more or less, in the motivations of users. In parallel, they are racing to take advantage of the new zeitgeist. That would be artificial intelligence (AI), useful in creating - if that’s the word - headlines, articles and anything else. Obsessed with cost-cutting, publishers live for the day when journalists, editors and everybody in between are replaced with bots. "This technology will replace journalists in the same way that spreadsheets replaced mathematicians,” said Oxford University computer science professor Michael Wooldridge, quoted by AFP (March 19). “In other words, I don't think it will.”

See also...

• Hot Topics - News Online

• Hot Topics - Journalism