Talking About Clickbait at CogSci ’22
When I joined the Cognitive Sciences Lab at IIIT Hyderabad in early 2017, the north star of publication was the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Sciences Society. Today, I am happy to share with all of you, that our work on the impact of clickbait on readers’ visual attention has been accepted in CogSci’22.
TLDR
Building on our earlier work on clickbait’s negative impact on news’ credibility, we wanted to explore clickbait’s impact on readers’ attention. Our primary motivation was to understand — Do clickbait headlines create a significant difference in how readers read an article and what information they pay attention to?
Using an eye-tracker setup based experiment on 60 participants, we showed that the answer is — yes. Readers pay lesser attention to an article if it has a clickbait headline, their attention is mostly focussed on finding the “answer” to the question the clickbait headline raises, and readers’ attention diminishes beyond that.
I’ll share a link to paper once the conference proceedings are published.
Impact
Our work questions the prevalence of clickbait headlines, and raises doubts around news organisations’ motivation to use clickbait. Over the course of the last few years, our research has raised the following points:
- Clickbait headlines have a negative impact on the credibility of the information being consumed.
- Clickbait headlines have a negative impact on readers’ visual attention on the news article.
- Clickbait is a phenomenon that is language-agnostic. Mainstream Hindi news headlines have comparable clickbait penetration to English news. Although alarmingly, clickbait prevention and detection techniques for non-English languages are lagging far behind measures available for English.
We hope to start a meaningful discussion on the usage of clickbait headlines, it’s pitfalls and the journalistic responsibility of news organisations to provide credible information to readers.
In the News
Our work was also featured in a Hindu Business article recently. Ironically, they used a clickbait headline.
