Your Brain Is Literally Wired to Click Clickbait (It's Not Your Fault) | Love and Deepspace

[00:00:00]Clickbait as a word, of course, is fairly recent because click as a mouse bait, well, you know what that is. Um but this practice is is not new. We have it in like [ __ ] newspaper headlines.

[00:00:14]You've had it in song titles. It has existed for a long time. And the place that it comes from is the curiosity gap.

[00:00:20]So, this isn't new marketing slang. We marketers will say this [ __ ] all the time, but the curiosity gap was named as a psychological concept from Carnegie Mellon an economist, George Loewenstein.

[00:00:32]Um he wrote this really cool paper in 1994. It's called the psychology of curiosity. And basically, to sum up his theory is that curiosity is a cognitively induced deprivation. Think far space deprivation, Caleb. And it basically it fires up when your brain notices a gap between what you know and what you want to know. And the gap itself is uncomfortable enough that closing it, so just clicking, feels rewarding regardless of what's on the other side. You don't even give a [ __ ] what the rest of it says. But I'm going to talk about why it's important nowadays when we get to that actual click. So, clickbait headlines are Yes.

[00:01:14]>> Is clickbait the same as sensationalism or is it different?

[00:01:18]>> Sensationalism is a part of it. Um but it's not what clickbait is.

[00:01:23]Sensationalism is just a type of content. And sensationalism is Nope, it's cool. It's what's used to get to create uh clickbait headline often.

[00:01:31]But anyway, clickbait headlines are engineered to open that gap, that curiosity gap, without giving you enough information to close it yourself. So, I was very excited because I'm a dork, and I found a 2026 paper on emotional aware clickbait. And it's called the valence arousal dominance model.

[00:01:51]And so, I know.

[00:01:53]So, go go find your hottest baby.

[00:01:56]Some light reading. I'm such a dork.

[00:01:59]>> [laughter] >> I have interested hobbies.

[00:02:03]So, effective clickbait does three things. One, it's high arousal. Like Zane touching your hand. Basically, it activates you in some way, shape, or form. It gets your heart rate up. Oh my god, they have banned Valco in fold [ __ ] up. That's the high arousal part.

[00:02:19]And then the strong balance. It is clearly good or it's clearly bad. It is rarely neutral, which is why our podcast gets [ __ ] on clicks.

[00:02:29]>> [laughter] >> It's really weird having a moral stance on the content that you make because >> [laughter] >> I have looked at Mom and been like, I could make us millionaires in a week.

[00:02:42]And she's like, do it. I'm like, I can't. I have morals.

[00:02:45]Um and so >> [laughter] >> and then I'm like, we have mortgages to pay. No, you don't. No, you you have a child. Pay for it. No. So, like that's where the strong balance comes in. It's clearly good or clearly bad. It is polarizing content. And then the third part is what's called low dominance. And that means it's deliberately incomplete.

[00:03:05]You do not have enough information to feel resolved. So, essentially, and I could pull up a billion [ __ ] headlines from certain content creators and be like, clickbait clickbait clickbait clickbait. But I'm assuming y'all can start piecing this together.

[00:03:20]You see something and I don't want to be like, this is just a YouTube thing. This is huge on Twitter. It's huge on social media. It's huge in in press headlines and everything. It's how they get you to click, guys. So, just keep that in mind.

[00:03:32]We're talking about the fact that holy [ __ ] it's not actually the content on the other side that you want. You want to click it so that you get the dopamine release. So, it's the reward anticipation. It's not the reward itself that is driving you to click. And as you know, you're playing a gotcha game. That is how gacha works as well. So, you as a gacha game player, no offense, are already primed to fall into this bespoke reality that we're going to talk about.

[00:04:02]So, essentially your brain releases dopamine when it anticipates discovering something, not necessarily when it actually does discover it, which is why the payoff of clicking is so often a letdown. One of my favorite um subreddits is saved you a click.

[00:04:16]>> [laughter] >> Articles will put 10 or 12 clicks before you get to the actual answer. This is why. Because it has you engage in the content, they get paid on engagement or views or whatever, and you're just like, what the [ __ ] So, it's the same anticipatory mechanism behind slot machines and gacha pulls.

[00:04:35]So, just keep that in mind. So, this is from um a paper called the psychology of clickbait.

[00:04:40]But, fun facts, researchers Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman analyzed 3 months of New York Times articles and found virality isn't driven by whether content is positive or negative, it's driven by arousal level.

[00:04:56]And what we talk about, hey, uh and we're not talking about dual [ __ ] we're talking about high arousal emotions, which tend to include awe or anger or anxiety. Those drive sharing.

[00:05:09]Low arousal emotions like sadness, depression suppress it, even when the content is otherwise absolutely identical in newsworthiness. By the way, this was done in 2012, which is insane.

[00:05:22]Um and then we can talk about like the whole separate landmark study that was done on social media posts uh around like moral, emotional, or outrage-coded words, which a lot of the valko content is that you're starting to see.

[00:05:40]Basically, if a post had outrage-coded words or moral, emotional, ah, the post was associated with a 24% increase in reposts. And this was um done as a study in 2017. I'll put all of these in in the description because cite your stuff.

[00:05:59]So, basically when a thumbnail of Valko's face like crossed out in red and a shocked face reaction cam and a title like they deleted him and here's why, you're going to click that. That's not a vibe, that's a [ __ ] formula.

[00:06:14]>> So.

[00:06:15]>> Yep. Superlatives plus incomplete information plus a face registering higher arousal equals the maximum curiosity gap and therefore the maximum click.

[00:06:26]So, the thing that I I want to do is talk about how this suddenly feeds into the algorithm for you because we've had several people on our Discord being like, "I don't want to see this content anymore." Or like, "I installed the game and I'm getting ads for it." All of that stuff. So, we're going to get into >> less like individual headline psychology and more into structural feedback loop.

[00:06:50]>> And so, like there's this claim that essentially engagement optimized platforms mechanically amplify emotional or outrageous content.

[00:06:59]And they do.

[00:07:01]YouTube does, friends.

[00:07:03]1,000% YouTube, Reddit, Twitter especially, all of that. So does Facebook and Meta. So, a 2025 PNAS Nexus study specifically isolated the algorithm's role as opposed to just people choosing. So, we're going to take the people out of it and found that engagement-based ranking amplifies emotionally charged and morally outrage content independent of who you follow and independent of what you say you want to see.

[00:07:31]So, yeah. The algorithm A is working against you in that to begin with because the algorithms know this content is going to get clicked and they're just going to apply an interest filter on top of it. Uh secondly, users get trained via social reward to escalate your own outrage. Uh and this is the spiral part.

[00:07:53]So, have you found yourself just like stuck talking about the Valco content or what In Fold has done and you keep repeating it and blah blah blah blah blah. So, a Yale study tracked over 7,000 Twitter users across 12.7 million tweets. That's a [ __ ] ton of tweets for these people. My holy gosh. I know. And they ran a controlled behavioral study or experiment.

[00:08:16]Basically, when outrage coded posts get likes or reposts, that person is measurably more likely to post outrage again.

[00:08:26]This is a straight-up reinforcement learning. It's the same mechanism that shapes any learning behavior. But, follow-up work from the same lab found that when something exploits that outrage as its distribution mechanism, so clickbait, outrage-triggered claims get shared more regardless of whether the sharer believes them or not. So, sometimes these two things come together and they're called the MAD model or motivation, attention, and design. The claim is that people who have uh identity-based motivation to share moral or emotional content, that content grabs their attention involuntarily, and then the platform that you're on is designed to amplify both.