原文地址：
Bad News: Negativity Increases Online News Consumption From: Psychology Today
A new study finds that negative words in headlines increase click-through rates.
Millions of people now get their news online. But with so much online content to consume and so little time to consume it, editors at news outlets know that writing “catchy” headlines is more important than ever. So, what makes a headline catchy? A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that negative emotion words in headlines made it more likely that consumers would click through and read the story. In contrast, positive emotion words decreased click rates.
The idea that people are more attentive to negative things is not a new one. Journalists have always had this intuition (captured in phrases like “if it bleeds, it leads”), and psychology studies have backed it up. People dislike losses more than they like gains, and they overweigh negative information in many contexts. Even infants pay more attention to negative stimuli. This negativity bias makes some sense from an evolutionary perspective: If you miss out on an opportunity to forage for some delicious berries, you will be sad…but if you accidentally eat a poison mushroom, you will be dead.
Given this negativity bias, do people tend to engage more with negative news content online? Previous research suggests that the answer is yes. For example, people share more content if it makes them angry. But a lot of this research has been done either in a controlled lab setting, or it has been correlational, so we can’t know for sure if negativity actually causes people to consume news more.
That’s why the dataset analyzed by Robertson and colleagues is so special. First of all, it is data on the number of clicks (“click-through rate” is the technical term) in response to >105,000 headlines on the news site Upworthy. Therefore, these are real decisions being made by real people. Moreover, Upworthy often tested out (through random assignment) different headlines for the same exact story, so they essentially ran experiments on their users. Therefore, even when the content of the news story was exactly the same, when editors put negative words like “hate” and “worst” into the headline, more people clicked on it, and when they included positive words like “love,” and “best,” fewer people clicked through.
Not only does this paper tell us more about the factors that influence online news consumption, but it also showcases the nuanced ways in which emotion influences decision-making. The researchers found that words about sadness increased click-through rates, but words about fear actually decreased them (and anger words had no significant effect). Now, we don’t know if people were actually feeling those emotions when they read the headlines, so we will need more studies to explore these effects further.
However, given that different discrete emotions might be associated with different appraisals of one’s current situation, it makes sense that not all negative emotions would have the same downstream effects on behavior. For example, previous research has shown that people are more optimistic and risk-seeking when they are angry, but they are more pessimistic and risk-averse when they are afraid.
In the future, it will be interesting to see how generalizable these findings are. For instance, this study did not look at individual differences in news consumption, and it is possible that the results would depend on the reader’s personality or age (e.g., older adults are less susceptible to negativity bias). But I’m excited about the trend of psychologists digging into real-world decision-making data to gain insights into the ways that emotion impacts decision-making.
生词记录
click-through rate 点击率
catchy 引人注意的，容易记住的，动人的
attentive 专心的，注意点，留心的
intuition 直觉
capture 赢得，获得，取得；描绘，刻画；拍摄，摄制
phrase 短语，说法，警句
if it bleeds, it leads 新闻媒体倾向于报道负面事件（可吸引更多关注）
stimuli 刺激物，促进因素
evolutionary 演变的，进化的
perspective 前途，观点，看法
poison 毒物
correlational 互为相关，相关性的
essentially 本质上，基本上，根本上，实际上
showcase 充分展示，展示…的优点
nuanced 细微差别
significant 显著，重要，明显make sense 有道理，有意义
discrete 独立的，各自的，独自的，离散的
appraisal 评定，鉴定，估价，评价
downstream 顺流地，向下游地；后阶段地
pessimistic 悲观的
risk-averse 规避风险
generalizable 可归纳的，可推广的，可概括性
susceptible 敏感，过敏，易受影响
文章概述
最近一项研究表明带有负面词汇标题可以给文章带来显著的点击率提升，文章围绕该项研究做出了较详细的叙述
个人感悟
我对文章的观点表示赞同，因为结合我考研时看过的B站某些视频，制造焦虑是很容易获得大量关注度的，其播放量往往也是最高的，这确是一大流量密码，可是这种行为实在可耻，考研本来就不是一件易事，还在别人迷茫寻找路线的时候给他人制造恐慌，制造焦虑绝对是不道德行为。
因此，打破焦虑最好的办法就是行动起来，多读书多看报，少看B站多睡觉。
