Negativity and Identity Language Have Additive Effects on Online News Consumption

Almost nine out of ten Americans get some of their news online, and outlets compete to monetize their attention. One strategy for news outlets to capture people’s attention is by producing headlines that activate negative feelings and make group identities salient. Prior research has found that headlines containing negative emotions or identity language receive more engagement. However, most existing research is based on correlational data, making it unclear why this content drives engagement. The present work addresses this gap by analyzing 43,932 headlines tested in randomized controlled trials that generated 164,053,523 impressions from the Upworthy Research Archive. We find that headlines containing both negativity and identity language increased the click rate by 9,9%, which is more than twice as likely as headlines containing only negative language (4.3%) and about two-thirds higher than headlines with only identity language (5.9%). We also found causal evidence in support of the out-group animosity hypothesis: Negativity about out-groups boosted engagement by 14.1%, compared to just 1.6% for negativity about in-groups. Our findings reveal that news media companies have an incentive to produce news headlines containing out-group derogation to maximize engagement, which may, in turn, heighten animosity between groups.