![]() Attentional biases towards negative stimuli begin in infancy 26 and persist into adulthood as a fast and automatic response 27. ![]() The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition-that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains 24, 25. Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massive online dataset of viral news stories from -a website that was one of the most successful pioneers of click-bait in the history of the Internet 23. Previous work has posited that competition pushes news sources to publish ‘click-bait’ news stories, often categorized by outrageous, upsetting and negative headlines 20, 21, 22. Therefore, it is crucial to understand exactly what drives online news consumption. As such, online media has a profound impact on society across domains such as marketing 10, 11, finance 12, 13, 14, health 15 and politics 16, 17, 18, 19. With the advent of the Internet, online media has become a widespread source of information and, subsequently, opinion formation 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Hence, online media is forced to compete for the extremely limited resource of reader attention 4. Even so, most users spend less than 5 minutes per month on all of the top 25 news sites put together 3. In the United States, 89% of adults get at least some of their news online, and reliance on the Internet as a news source is increasing 2. ![]() However, a large portion of news readership now occurs online-the motivation to sell papers transformed into a motivation to keep readers clicking on new articles. The newsroom phrase ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ was coined to reflect the intuition among journalists that stories about crime, bloodshed and tragedy sell more newspapers than stories about good news 1. ![]()
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