Why we can't resist clickbait

If you are continuing to read this article, I can be satisfied: the title has worked. It has aroused your curiosity.

This cannot be taken for granted: in the fast-paced digital age, our attention span is worryingly shrinking to match that of a goldfish - not gratifying for the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, isn’t it?

On average, our concentration would last 8 seconds.

Twenty years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, the same figure was around 12 seconds: in a handful of years, the spread of digital media (along with other factors) has deeply changed us.

First of all: what is clickbait?

For years there has been a lot of talk about clickbait, deemed a degeneration of information and journalism - just like fake news.

But what is clickbait? According to Wikipedia:

“Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading”.

The key element is to provide a partial and incomplete information:

“A ‘teaser’ aims to exploit the ‘curiosity gap’, providing just enough information to make readers of news websites curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content”.

The teaser itself is not a necessarily unfair practice. But the “click-bait headlines add an element of dishonesty, using enticements that do not accurately reflect the content being delivered”.

Obviously, as a rule, the ultimate goal of the whole operation is not to draw attention to the article itself, but to the copious ads that usually fill this type of site - and those ads often apply the clickbait trick themselves.

Information overload makes our attention more precious and rare

When the competition for readers and customers becomes wilder, unfair, unscrupulous and desperate tactics are more likely to emerge.

Clickbait is the poisoned fruit of audiences which are increasingly hasty and unfocused and competitors which are increasingly numerous and fierce.

A mix of factors that push towards a simplistic and sensationalist communication.

Hence the tendency to write overstated, unlikely and misleading headlines.

Or, in many cases (e.g. the traditional tabloid press), headlines exploit the virulence and immediacy of dangerous emotions such as fear and anger, risking to generate visceral and impulsive reactions.

Do you remember, a few years ago, the hype on social media of posts denouncing the alleged privileges of immigrants and refugees?

At first glance they might seem spontaneous, but they were probably orchestrated by a precise political strategy.

What mentally triggers clickbait?

There is no a unique answer, but clickbait seems to leverage our desire to reach a thorough and complete knowledge (need for cognitive closure) and to conclude pending activities (Zeigarnik effect).

The need for cognitive closure makes us search for certain answers and reject ambiguity.

We need precise and well-defined information to make reliable predictions and reduce the margins of risk and uncertainty.

We tend to achieve closure as quickly as possible and to maintain it for as long as possible, even if this may limit the information processing and make it more rough and superficial.

It’s easy to imagine how this can power clickbait: headlines provide incomplete or uncertain information that instinctively pushes us to complete the missing piece and resolve the ambiguity.

The Zeigarnik effect (named after the Lithuanian psychologist who discovered it) instead states that we remember more easily the uncompleted and interrupted activities than the completed ones.

Another explanation for clickbait's irresistibility is that “the promise of compelling information activates a particular dopamine pathway”.

“Our dopamine-reward system is involved in our motivation to learn about our world (...) There is a body of research suggesting that dopamine incentivizes behavior more through wanting (called incentive salience) than liking. In effect, the dopamine creates an itch that needs to be scratched (...) by obtaining the promised information”.

A simple remedy: to reward quality content

Clickbait - or at least a particular type of clickbait - can benefit our communication and make it more savory and engaging.

But, beyond certain limits, it puts our credibility at risk and causes us lose our most precious asset: the trust of readers.

There are countless ways to feed curiosity with balance, honesty and authority.

The title of this article is meant to be an example of a fair clickbait: it introduces a topic and hints something, but without raising excessive expectations and deceiving readers.

I hope you enjoyed it.

And if we want to nip clickbait at its root, making its ultimate goal useless, we have another chance: to pay for quality information.

So editorial projects will depend less on advertising (avoiding misleading headlines and the frenzied hunt for clicks) and more on the active interest of an aware and attentive public.