The psychology of clickbait
How creators weaponize curiosity (for good or for ill)
People hate “clickbait” because it is literally engineered to put you in a state of discomfort.
Marketing strategists talk openly about how the purpose of a clickbait headline is to intentionally create a gap between the information you’re given and the information that’s withheld. Here are 3 recent representative examples from Upworthy:
“The number one conversation mistake that instantly kills good rapport instead of building it”
“Woman is shocked after learning the bizarre technique people use to make their spray tans last”
“Robin Williams saw a struggling comedian bomb on stage. He knew exactly what to say to her.”
(To save you 3 clicks: the “toxic conversation mistake” is hijacking the conversation to monologue about yourself, the “secret to making spray tans last” is to avoid washing most of your body, and the thing Robin Williams said is “You were amazing,” with “a gentle look like, ‘We’re all in this together.’”)
These headlines prey on your curiosity. The real purpose of the headline is to make you aware of your own ignorance, and it does this by giving you incomplete information. If they put the whole thing in the headline, you wouldn’t have to click.
It’s not just Upworthy that is doing this. For example, if you want to learn more about Upworthy, you can read a New York Times article that is titled:
Notice how this NYT headline does the same thing, creating what behavioral economist George Loewenstein described as an “information gap.” The headline tells you something new: people are rejecting the news because it makes them feel anxious. You then ask: what are they reading instead? If you want to learn the answer, you need to click. And then you do click, and you get a story about how “good news”-themed content online has grown more popular.
The NYT is using the same headline tactic as Upworthy, but the content is very different, both ethically and mechanically. In the case of the Upworthy headlines, the “content” that you wanted is basically a single sentence, and that single sentence is buried under several paragraphs of preamble filler to create more real estate for ads.
The NYT story is baiting the hook in the same way, but it has a lot more to say about its subject matter: the story isn’t just “more people are clicking on uplifting news from sites like Upworthy;” the NYT talks about how much of that “news” is unsourced garbage that doesn’t follow basic journalistic standards for fact-checking, with the rare exception of a few outlets like National Geographic that do “good news” while following basic journalistic rigor. The NYT also talks about how these “good news” stories are monetized through advertising, and how advertisers are often skittish about running ads on “tragedy,” so positive stories might be more of a “safe space for brands.”
Unlike the Upworthy clickbait, it’s a story that you couldn’t have compressed that entire story down to a single sentence. So, in that sense, it’s good that I got baited into clicking, because instead of getting empty calories, I got something more akin to an actual dinner. The NYT earned my click.
Still, that NYT headline is asking for your attention. That might be annoying if it interrupted your scroll on Facebook, or it might be exactly what you were looking for, if you were already on the NYT app and looking for a story to read.
What if we created an ecosystem for a sort of “consensual clickbait?” People could readily opt in and say, “I’m going to open the clickbait app on my phone to see all of the clickbait headlines, because I have some spare time and want something that will captivate me. If I see an eye-catching headline, I will not resent the distraction; I want someone to grab my attention.”
That is kind of what YouTube has become.
YouTube is “the clickbait platform”
I have spent past 8 years scriptwriting hundreds of videos, with the median video getting millions of views.
When I want to make what I do sound more virtuous, I say things like “I make educational videos about pop culture topics, like physics lessons on how Ant-Man’s powers are affected by the square-cube law, or what Pokemon can teach us about epigenetics.” It sounds so respectable when I describe it like that.
But in order to get 8 million gamers to watch a video about physics, you need to get them to click. And so, the videos I write get packaged like this:
When I showed this thumbnail at a recent conference talk, Yassine Meskhout remarked from the audience that “I hate how much I want to click on it,” which is such a perfect articulation of why people hate clickbait, and why it works.
But if you do click on it and watch the video, I don’t think you’ll hate yourself for clicking on it. In fact, I think that the video itself is a lot more edifying than the thumbnail might suggest: after 15 minutes of viewing, you’ll find that you got clickbaited…into learning about astrophysics, and how real-world black holes behave very differently from the black holes described in the Pokemon universe.
In that sense, it seems like a bit of bait-and-switch: “you thought you were going to get candy, but you got vegetables instead!” And yet “bait-and-switch” implies a bit of deception, and I think those who clicked for candy will not find their expectations betrayed. You’ll get the science lesson, but you’ll also get the kinetic audiovisual presentation, and pop culture references, and a high-energy YouTuber talking about your favorite video game franchise.
I think it’s quite analogous to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye’s TV show is not a 37-page academic paper cosplaying as a kids’ show. It’s a kids’ show first, and uses that as a vehicle to smuggle in real science. You got the science lesson, but you paid attention because of the wacky sound effects and fast transitions and a fast-talking funny man using simple words to explain scientific principles.
That’s how I saw my work at Theorist. I’m not taking a serious lecture and disguising it as pop culture; I’m finding the genuine intersection of pop culture and science (or math, or history, or whatever today’s lesson happens to be about). You get the thing you clicked for, and something a bit more edifying that leaves you feeling more educated than when you started. The kale smoothie can still have sugary fruit.
When people hate the Upworthy style of clickbait, I don’t think that their complaint is purely about the packaging. The real problem with Upworthy is that it never earns the click. It’s almost all empty filler to show you more ads. But when you click on a New York Times article, or a Theorist video, you get to spend 10 minutes learning about an interesting subject that you already had some curiosity about (which is why you clicked).
In other words, the thing that distinguishes the worst kind of “clickbait” isn’t the packaging. It’s what happens after the click. The title got your hopes up, and the content disappointed.
Expectations vs reality
If I promise something good, and then deliver crap, you’ll feel cheated.
Let’s define a promise delta:
PD = payoff - promise
If the PD is negative, I raised expectations above what I could deliver, and that creates resentment. That’s what you get from bad clickbait: the title implies something life-changing, but the article delivers one sentence and six ads.
It’s tempting to think that the fix is to do the opposite: If you promise a 5/10 and deliver an 8/10, the audience away pleasantly surprised. That sounds virtuous, but it has two problems:
If you actually believe your thing is an 8, then promising a 5 is bad calibration. What might seem like “humility” is actually lying about your own estimate!
In a competitive environment, chronic underpromising means you never get picked. If everyone else is promising “8” and you’re promising “5,” you never get the click. The viewer doesn’t give you a chance to “overdeliver.”
It’s not good to overpromise, but it’s not good to underpromise, either! You should aim for a promise delta of zero: match the audience’s expectations to what you’re actually delivering.
If a headline cranks my curiosity all the way up, and then the payoff is genuinely fascinating, I don’t feel scammed, because the content earned the click!
The “information gap”
Clickbait is engineered to create discomfort: the headline creates tension, and you have to click to resolve the question. For example, the title gives you a question, and the article is the answer to that question.
This is how I titled my most recent post:
This is an example of a title that is designed to create that sort of gap. Hawaiians have to pay $9/gallon for milk. And if you want to know why, you’ll have to click on that post and read it. If you don’t click, you will be left with the tension of not knowing.
But I don’t feel bad about creating this “itch” or “discomfort.” Scientists have another term for that feeling: curiosity.
Behavioral economist George Loewenstein described curiosity an itch or discomfort that emerges from the information gap “between what we know and what we want to know.” And to scratch that itch, we seek out information.
“Discomfort” and “itch” are negatively connoted words. But curiosity is delightful (and virtuous).
The sin of bad clickbait isn’t that it made you feel an itch, but that it made you feel an itch and then failed to give you a satisfying payoff. The failure is in the second half.
If I can make you feel the itch of curiosity, and then make you feel satisfied when you scratch that itch, I think that’s really quite a wonderful thing, even though I had to make you feel a temporary state of discomfort.
All the best YouTubers do this
I love the educational channel Veritasium, which has mastered the art of using the “information gap” to create curiosity that inspires you to click.
I went my entire life not knowing what happens if you throw sand into a jet engine. I was perfectly content to not know, until this title and thumbnail made me want to know. And, how convenient, here is a video that is specifically designed to answer that question, and so I now get to experience the joy of watching a 40-minute educational video that will tell me all of that and more.
Before seeing this video title and thumbnail, I didn’t even know that the Navy had an indoor ocean. And yet now that I have been given that knowledge, my appetite for knowledge isn’t sated. It’s the opposite: getting this tiny bit of knowledge makes me hungry for more knowledge! It makes me want to click on the video to get the full story!
“Getting a little bit of knowledge makes us crave more knowledge” is exactly what we would predict based on George Loewenstein’s “information gap” theory of curiosity, where curiosity emerges when we discover a gap between what we know and what we want to know. A 2008 Caltech study hooked a bunch of students up to an fMRI machine and studied their brain signals when they were asked trivia questions, and found that curiosity follows an inverted U-shaped curve, sort of like this:
When I see a random novel sitting on the shelf at the bookstore, I probably have near zero curiosity about how the story ends. And after I’ve finished reading the novel, I also have no curiosity about how it ends. But when I’m in the middle of reading the book, my curiosity is at its peak. “Which one of these characters is the murderer?” is a question that I can only ask when I’m in the middle of a mystery novel.
The job of good packaging is to leapfrog me to the middle of the curve: sometimes, a great book cover can get me curious even before I’ve read the first sentence. And sometimes, a good video title can get me curious even before I’ve watched a single second, like this one from Polymatter:
Before seeing this packaging, I was fine not knowing why China had an Eiffel-Tower knockoff and a whole wave of “weird architecture.” Now the thumbnail has forced me to want to know: why was this ever a thing, and why did it get banned? And if I want the answers to those questions, I can click the video.
This packaging immediately jumps me close to the middle of the “knowledge curve,” where my curiosity is at its highest. I get the itch to learn, and then in exchange for 14 minutes of my time, I can get an edifying educational video that scratches that itch. And what a wonderful thing that is.
This is the kind of thing that has led to the success of hundreds of YouTube videos I’ve worked on over the past 8 years, and it’s what I intend to do when I launch my own YouTube channel in Q1 2026. I want to use “clickbait” in the virtuous way: inspire curiosity about something real, then actually tell you the answer in an interesting way that’s worth your time.
Here are some representative video titles:
Why does it cost $1 billion to build a mile of subway?
The man who saved a billion lives1
Why milk costs $9/gallon in Hawaii (already a Substack text post that you can read here!)
No, “twin studies” are not about twins separated at birth (also a Substack text post you can read!)
The “man who saved a billion lives” is Norman Borlaug, and I think this is a perfect example of a headline that justifies the click: even if I told you “the answer” in the headline, you’d still need to click to discover the interesting part, which is how an agronomist saved a billion lives. If you want the answer to that question, subscribe to this newsletter!
I have a blog, and I carefully craft my titles to help maximize my viewership; I suppose you could call that an example of "clickbait."