Clickbait

“You’ll never guess what this media trend is doing to your brain.” “This common internet occurrence might be destroying our democracy.” If this article included its own hyperbolic hooks, these phrases might be enough to draw you in, but you may quickly realize the punchy headlines are more dramatic than the rest of the piece. Hopefully, you’ll still be intrigued enough to learn about the how and why behind the topic that you’ll stay long enough to unpack the phenomenon (and you’ll forgive the unnecessarily flashy introduction lines). Clickbait uses headlines that intentionally over-promise and under-deliver. These types of videos and articles follow a relatively unoriginal headline format, and the content of the media often merely restates the headline or copies content from a more genuine news source.

While clickbait may seem like just a harmless nuisance (or a particularly annoying part of your daily scroll), it can actually have far-reaching consequences. These attention-grabbing headlines tend to exploit well-known cognitive biases, like our aversion to uncertainty (the “curiosity gap”) or our tendency to react strongly to emotionally charged stimuli.1 When weaponized at scale, clickbait doesn’t just waste our time; it can also distort our understanding of current events and make it harder to distinguish fact from fiction. Sinister clickbait often fuels misinformation and can polarize public discourse, sometimes shaping our decision-making in subtle but significant ways.