“Clickbait” has become a common form of online media, and headlines designed to entice people to click are frequently used by both legitimate and lessthan-legitimate news sources. We present the results of a pair of experiments with di↵erent sets of subject pools: one conducted using Facebook ads that explicitly target people with a high preference for clickbait, the other using a sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects’ individual-level preference for clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines. We find that older people and non-Democrats have a higher “preference for clickbait,” but find no evidence that assignment to read clickbait headlines drives a↵ective polarization, information retention, or trust in media.

中文翻译：

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Clickbait 标题对极化、信任和学习的（无效）影响

“点击诱饵”已成为一种常见的在线媒体形式，旨在吸引人们点击的标题经常被合法和不合法的新闻来源使用。我们展示了一组不同主题池的实验结果：一个是使用 Facebook 广告进行的，这些广告明确针对对点击诱饵有高度偏好的人，另一个使用从亚马逊的 Mechanical Turk 招募的样本。我们估计受试者对 clickbait 的个人偏好，并随机分配一组受试者阅读 clickbait 或传统标题。我们发现老年人和非民主党人对点击诱饵有更高的“偏好”，但没有证据表明阅读点击诱饵标题会导致有效的两极分化、信息保留或对媒体的信任。