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Negativity drives online news consumption
Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we condu...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10202797/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36928780 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4 |
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author | Robertson, Claire E. Pröllochs, Nicolas Schwarzenegger, Kaoru Pärnamets, Philip Van Bavel, Jay J. Feuerriegel, Stefan |
author_facet | Robertson, Claire E. Pröllochs, Nicolas Schwarzenegger, Kaoru Pärnamets, Philip Van Bavel, Jay J. Feuerriegel, Stefan |
author_sort | Robertson, Claire E. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated ∼5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10202797 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-102027972023-05-24 Negativity drives online news consumption Robertson, Claire E. Pröllochs, Nicolas Schwarzenegger, Kaoru Pärnamets, Philip Van Bavel, Jay J. Feuerriegel, Stefan Nat Hum Behav Registered Report Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated ∼5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-03-16 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10202797/ /pubmed/36928780 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Registered Report Robertson, Claire E. Pröllochs, Nicolas Schwarzenegger, Kaoru Pärnamets, Philip Van Bavel, Jay J. Feuerriegel, Stefan Negativity drives online news consumption |
title | Negativity drives online news consumption |
title_full | Negativity drives online news consumption |
title_fullStr | Negativity drives online news consumption |
title_full_unstemmed | Negativity drives online news consumption |
title_short | Negativity drives online news consumption |
title_sort | negativity drives online news consumption |
topic | Registered Report |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10202797/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36928780 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4 |
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