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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 6, 2025

Loneliness Assuaged: Eye-Tracking an Audience Watching Barrage Videos

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Published on: May 29, 2020

Negativity drives online news consumption.

Claire E Robertson¹, Nicolas Pröllochs², Kaoru Schwarzenegger³

¹Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

Nature Human Behaviour

|March 17, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Negative words in online news headlines significantly boost reader engagement. Each negative word increases click-through rates by 2.3%, driving online news consumption and shaping public opinion.

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Area of Science:

Computational social science
Digital media studies
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Online media plays a crucial role in informing the public and shaping opinions.
Understanding the drivers of online news consumption is vital in the digital age.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the causal effect of negative and emotional language in news headlines on online news consumption.
To quantify the impact of specific word types on user engagement with online news content.

Main Methods:

Analysis of a large dataset of viral news stories from Upworthy.com, comprising approximately 105,000 headline variations.
Utilized a series of randomized controlled trials (N=22,743) to establish causal relationships.
Measured news consumption through click-through rates across over 370 million impressions.

Main Results:

Negative words in headlines were found to increase news consumption rates.
Conversely, positive words in headlines were associated with decreased consumption rates.
An increase of one negative word in an average-length headline correlated with a 2.3% rise in click-through rate.

Conclusions:

The prevalence of negative language in headlines causally influences online news consumption.
Findings provide insights into user engagement with online media and the psychological drivers behind news sharing.
This research contributes to a deeper understanding of digital media dynamics and content virality.