Beautiful Russian Girls Wanting to Date YOU in Your Area?!
Have I managed to entice you? Tempt you with the prospect of a bunch of stunning ladies yearning to get to know you on a more… personal level?
To be honest with you, those are usually just bots who meddle with the GPS in your devices.
Alas, I am not an automated dirty-talking bot in the guise of some amalgamate complied of spicy ladies.
Nope. You have fallen for my cunning trap.
Clickbait.
One of the main reasons why, quite a few people actually, wholly and truly believe that social media is for idiots.
This year, every title you see roaming on social media has been filled with highly searchable keywords and phrases. This rubbish content shows up on the top of search results, gets clicked on and since people aren’t clicking off these numbers grow and grow to tens and hundreds of millions of views as more and more people gets funnelled in and the cycle just repeats itself.
And I hear you thinking; If the content is so bad why wouldn’t you click out of it? Why would you click on it at all?
You’re asking the right thing there and that brings us to the true root of the problem. The base on which this whole problematic pyramid is built.
The user.
Us.
Our behaviour.
That’s right, I’m saying that throughout all of this we’re the problem.
Now before you get upset, stop and think about it as… honestly, if it’s not good then why the hell are you still on certain pages?
What a good hypothetical question.
Let me give you the answer.
It’s all built on our brain’s innate feelings. Let’s start with the decision to click. Why the internet hates clickbait but still falls for it.
Jean Piaget, a famous child developmental psychologist, created something known as ‘disequilibrium theory’ which concluded that the human brain hates being unbalanced. It hates being unresolved. That’s why when you hear an unresolved music chord you feel uncomfortable, uneasy, nervous, or your brain wants to jump ahead to resolve it. Good stories work the exact same way, you don’t know what happens next and are just eager to keep on reading. That’s why titles like: “I can’t believe this happened” or “You wouldn’t believe-” appear like mini stories. They put you into that unresolved state, only giving you half the story but you need to see how it ends, so you click to resolve the tension in your brain and what you find on the other end is probably going to be disappointing or an outright lie. Probably a combination of both: a disappointing lie.
So, you would think that after being burned so many times that people would just learn and stop clicking, yet it still works but… why?
Because the human brain is really dumb.
There’s this little thing that our bodies produce known as dopamine, a neurotransmitter in your brain that acts like a reward. When you eat good food? You take a bite of your favourite spaghetti- BOOM! Huge amount of dopamine. But when it comes to clickbait the dopamine shot actually comes before you click. It’s the anticipation of the reward, the thought of clicking that gets you the reward, not the actual article or video on the other end. This goes a long way to help explain why people still linger on these sites that don’t actually deliver on the clickbait, you’re still high off of the click so to get these disappointing results might make the reward stronger. Science has shown that when there’s a payoff only fifty-percent of the time, the times when you get rewarded dopamine goes through the roof because now it’s a gamble.
You’re not guaranteed a reward. But hell if I know, there very may well be the Russian beauty of your dreams just waiting for you behind that click!
The reward is that much stronger so each website is like its own mystery egg, a chance to either get a great experience or be disappointed and move on to the next one.
But once you’ve clicked, what is keeping you there?
Considering you’re still reading this article, you already made it this far. What is making you stay? Maybe you find what I have to say interesting or my promise of promiscuous ladies really did take your fancy and you’re still hopeful. Well, the reason, quite frankly is that our brains are not only dumb but they’re also lazy.
We live in a world where there are thousands of choices that we make every day.
Picture a trip to the shops which, I don’t know about you, is a really overwhelming experience for me. You want a jar of pasta sauce but it’s not just “grab any jar”, you have to decide what brand to choose, then if you wanted chunky or smooth, spicy or not, then there is the price. Now, remember this is just for the pasta sauce; there is no less than three or four choices for one item on your shopping list.
We assume as a society that more choices mean better options and greater satisfaction. I mean I wound up with the perfect pasta sauce for my individual tastes so I should be happy but the process of getting there was really tough. This all relates to the concept of decision fatigue. The brain is like a muscle but unlike lifting weights your brain gets a workout by making small decisions like What I should eat for breakfast? This is kind of like a two-pound weight. Not super exhausting but big decisions like Should I buy this house? or Where should I go for my degree?are like the barbells you see Olympic weightlifters dealing with. Heavy and exhausting things gets the brain, just like any muscle, tired out if you use it too much; for instance, judges in court have been scientifically shown to make less favourable decisions later in the day than they do earlier in the day.
Sucks for you about that shoplifting charge.
Now think about clicking and viewing different sites shared on your social media. There are millions of them and each click you make online requires you to make a choice. You have to click it, that’s not really hard. It’s the equivalent of that two-pound weight. Thus, when you have to make that decision over and over again your brains gonna start to get tired or when presented with too many choices people tend to avoid decisions entirely. A phenomenon called decision avoidance, where people who had more choices were often less willing to decide to buy anything at all and their subsequent satisfaction was lower when they had been confronted with multiple options than they did when they were faced with only a few. What you have on social media is literally dozens of choices available from the start. So, it’s just easier to sit back and just look through what you have than to find something else that would be better.
The Internet thrives on the click of decision fatigue these days, and it’s easy to complain about articles having too much clickbait but at the end of the day those are just the end result of the real problem here, us as users.
If we want to make sure that we’re viewing and sharing higher quality content, it’s our responsibility to go against our basic instincts and weed ourselves away from clickbait. That if we support a creator we support them in whatever they do because the way that we handle our online entertainment is truly going to shape the future of what we see, what we think, and where the world goes from here and that’s no exaggeration.
With thanks to Ida Broni
