Rethinking the Negativity Bias Online: The Heterogeneous Effects of Negative Language on Online News Engagement

Negative language is widely believed to boost engagement online—but does it always work? Across six studies combining over 150,000 headline field experiments and five pre-registered experiments (N = 8,369), we find that the effects of negative tone and emotion vary widely and depend critically on the reader’s goals. In large-scale headline A/B tests across 398 news platforms from around the world, negatively worded headlines showed no average effect on engagement, but revealed stark heterogeneity across platforms. Experiments testing this heterogeneity do not support differences in content or reader’s site-specific expectations, but instead identified a motivational distinction: whether readers seek credibility or enjoyment from news. Crucially, this motivational orientation appears to be a characteristic of the audiences that different platforms attract—rather than a structural feature of the platforms themselves. In controlled experiments, we show that under credibility-seeking goals, negative language triggers inferences of manipulative intent, suppressing engagement even for societally important topics. By contrast, under enjoyment goals, the same negative language may increase appeal to readers. In political contexts, we further find that while negative emotion heightens affective polarization, negative tone—when paired with credibility goals—can reduce partisan favoritism. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that “negativity sells,” and instead show that the effects depend on goal alignment. In high-stakes domains like health, science, and politics, emotional negativity in headlines can backfire—undermining trust, engagement, and civic discourse. Goal-sensitive communication strategies are essential in a fragmented digital environment.