You know the one. You’re scrolling and a headline says, “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe.” You know it’s going to be nothing. You click anyway. It’s nothing. You close the tab feeling a little dumb, and forty seconds later you do it again.

For 30 years I wrote headlines and email subject lines for a living, and the job was scored on one number: how many people clicked. I’ve built lines like the garlic one on purpose and tested them against plainer versions. So here’s how they’re put together, and a quick check that tells you whether a headline is informing you or holding something back.

Why it works: the curiosity gap

The trick is older than the internet. In 1994, a Carnegie Mellon psychologist named George Loewenstein reviewed decades of research on curiosity and landed on a simple explanation. Curiosity shows up when you notice a gap between what you know and what you want to know. The important part is how that gap feels. It’s less like interest and more like an itch, a small sense of something missing that you want to close.

Loewenstein called it an information gap. I call it the curiosity gap.

Look at the garlic headline again. It tells you almost everything: a man, garlic, shoes, bedtime. The only thing missing is what happened. That missing piece is the itch, and clicking is how you scratch it.

The three moves

Once you know these, you’ll see them every time you read a bait headline.

Move 1: Hide the who. The headline won’t tell you who the story is about. You get “he,” “this celebrity,” or “a common household item.” You get most of the story, minus the one word that would tell you whether you care.

Move 2: Point at the answer. The headline doesn’t say what happened. It tells you the answer is one click away: “what happens next,” “here’s why,” “the reason will surprise you.” In 2015, two Danish researchers, Jonas Blom and Kenneth Reinecke Hansen, studied 100,000 headlines and gave this move a name: forward reference. The headline points ahead at the article instead of telling you what’s in it. They found it most on sites that depend on clicks to make money.

Move 3: Promise a feeling. “Hard to believe.” “Priceless.” “Left everyone speechless.” The headline tells you how to feel about something it won’t show you.

The garlic headline uses all three. Who is “he”? That’s move one. “What happens next” is move two. “Hard to believe” is move three.

And here’s the twist. Facebook itself published that exact headline in 2016, as an example of what it was trying to push down in people’s feeds. A company that makes money on attention went after the most reliable click on the internet. Its stated reason was simple: people had told Facebook they wanted to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines.

Running the Source Test on a headline

Every bait headline makes you a promise: there’s something here worth your click. On this channel we run the Source Test on promises like that.

Stake: who gains if you believe it? The publisher. They get paid when you click, not when you’re glad you clicked. The article can be nothing and they still got paid, so there’s no reason for it to be good.

Source: how do we know this is done on purpose and not just lazy writing? Two pieces of proof. First, when Facebook built its 2016 filter, a team read thousands of headlines by hand and sorted out the clickbait using two questions: does the headline hold back what the story is about, and does it oversell it? Then Facebook built a filter to catch those phrases, the way your email catches spam. Nobody builds a spam filter for an accident.

Second, Upworthy, the site that made this style famous, tested its headlines like a lab. Researchers later published the archive: more than 32,000 experiments and about 150,000 headline versions shown to readers hundreds of millions of times. The winners became the headlines you remember from 2013.

Steelman: what’s the best case for the other side? Opening a gap isn’t a crime. Every mystery novel does it. Every good teacher does it. I did it at the start of the video. A headline that told you everything would be a summary, and nobody clicks a summary. So the gap by itself isn’t the trick.

The fill-in-the-blank check

Here’s the whole trick in two sentences. A gap the story fills is a good story. A gap the story never fills is bait.

You can tell which one you’ve got before you click. Ask one question: can I say what this story is about, just from the headline?

“When she looked under her couch cushions and saw this, I was shocked.” Saw what? You can’t say. Bait.

“The dog barked at the delivery man and his reaction was priceless.” What reaction? You can’t say. Bait.

The garlic one? You still can’t say what happened. Only the writer knows, and the writer left it out on purpose.

The honest part

You’d think this trick would cost a news site your trust. I looked for proof of that, and it isn’t clean. In 2016, researchers at the University of Texas showed headlines to about 2,000 American adults. Some were plain, some were questions, and some pointed at the answer like the ones above. The question headlines got slightly worse reactions. The ones that pointed at the answer didn’t: people rated them about the same as the plain ones.

So using this trick doesn’t reliably hurt the site, and that’s a big part of why it’s everywhere. The site doesn’t pay for it. You do, forty seconds at a time.

I’ll own my part. I open a gap at the start of every video I make, on purpose. The difference is that I tell you what you’ll get before I ask for anything, and then I give it to you. The gap gets filled. That’s the line between a story and bait, and I’d hold everyone to it, including me.

Sources

• Loewenstein, G. (1994). The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116(1), 75–98.
• Blom, J. N., & Hansen, K. R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics 76, 87–100.
• Peysakhovich, A., & Hendrix, K. Facebook Newsroom (Aug. 4, 2016). Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed.
• Matias, J. N., Munger, K., Aubin Le Quere, M., & Ebersole, C. (2021). The Upworthy Research Archive. Scientific Data 8, 195.
• Scacco, J. M., & Muddiman, A. (2016). Investigating the Influence of “Clickbait” News Headlines. Center for Media Engagement, University of Texas at Austin.