“Clickbait” headlines designed to entice people to click are frequently used by both legitimate and less-than-legitimate news sources. Contemporary clickbait headlines tend to use emotional partisan appeals, raising concerns about their impact on consumers of online news. This article reports the results of a pair of experiments with different sets of subject pools: one conducted using Facebook ads that explicitly target people with a high preference for clickbait, the other using a sample recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects' individual-level preference for clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines. Findings show that older people and non-Democrats have a higher “preference for clickbait,” but reading clickbait headlines does not drive affective polarization, information retention, or trust in media.
CITATION STYLE
Munger, K., Luca, M., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. (2020, March 1). The (NULL) effects of clickbait headlines on polarization, trust, and learning. Public Opinion Quarterly. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaa008
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