When Curiosity Gaps Backfire: Effects of Headline Concreteness on Information Selection Decisions

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• Marianne Simone Aubin Le Quere (Cornell University)
• Wednesday 28 February 2024, 15:00-16:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yara Kyrychenko.

Journalists often use curiosity-inducing tactics in headlines to maximally appeal to readers, yet studies do not consistently show that clickbait techniques yield more engagement. In this talk, I tie headline strategies back to psychological theories about the information gap — the belief that curiosity is piqued when people are made aware of a gap in their knowledge. I introduce the Upworthy Research Archive, a large-scale corpus of A/B-tested news headlines that enables testing the causal effect of linguistics cues on reader behavior. By modeling the amount of information conveyed in a headline using an automated measured of sentence concreteness, I show that that there can be too much, or too little, information conveyed in a headline. I argue that computer scientists and communication scholars should rethink the binary nature of clickbait headlines in light of these findings.

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This talk is part of the Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS) series.

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