You know you don’t need to be tempted by the “27 Life Hacks That Will Change Everything” headline. You click nonetheless. Listicles plague social media, blogs, and news websites because they exploit ancient brain biases. Why your brain loves lists reveals how authors and marketers hijack your brain, and why you can’t resist being seduced.
Lists give us convenience, closure, and peace of mind in an ocean of information. Listicle psychology is not a sign of stupidity or laziness. It is simply figuring it out in your mind and deciding to be in control in the face of overwhelming situations.
Cognitive Ease: Lists Make Mental Load Less Burdensome
Your brain is constantly estimating the difficulty of tasks. Lists are an indicator of low cognitive effort, making things seem readable and achievable.
This Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, refers to it as “cognitive ease”—if things can be scrolled through easily in the brain, you’ll be more likely to read them. Lists allow structure to be seen at a glance, thereby averting cognitive effort on blocks of text.
The major reason lists lower cognitive load:
- Chunking – Dividing information into small pieces is faster and simpler to process and recall
- Reading visually – Bulleted or numbered lists cause eyes to jump right to key locations
- Monitoring progress – You always know exactly how much content is left, no guessing
Cornell University studies have found that people absorb facts more effectively when they are presented in a list format rather than in block text. Scaffolding forms are mental scaffolds, and they enable your brain to file information neatly. Scrolling mindlessly through feeds, your exhausted attention system is drawn to material that requires little effort but demands a lot of understanding.
Read More: Why Humans Love Mini Versions of Things
The Zeigarnik Effect: Unfinished Business Haunts You
When you begin something with a sequence of numbers, your mind is left to complete it. That’s the Zeigarnik Effect, named in honor of psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who described waiters remembering the incomplete orders but completely forgetting the completed ones.
Incompletes are a source of psychological discomfort. Reading “7 Ways to Improve Productivity” and beginning the list puts your mind into a loop that will continue to remind you until you complete it. Content creators capitalize on this by creating high-quality content at positions 1 and 2, which captivates you before the rest of the lower-quality content.
BuzzFeed actually did that math right. “23 Things Only 90s Kids Remember” headlines are attention-grabbers, and they are attention-grabbers in the hopes of seeing whether you’ve checked off all 23. Even if 15-20 are awful, you’ve gotten so far into it that you want the list to just be over.
This is the reason why you continue reading listicles that you know are clickbait. Partial lists are open tabs in your browser that are running in the background, waiting to be terminated as cached processes. Mind closure, if only the news is disappointing.
Read More: The Mandela Effect: Why Entire Groups Remember Things Wrong
Control in Chaos: Lists as Relief from Anxiety
Modern life bombards you with unending flows of information and boundless uncertainty. Lists are psychic refuge, moored, compartmentalized, numbered pieces of information.
Harvard’s Dr. David Comer Kidd has observed how reading lists take flight to the stratosphere during periods of social turmoil and concern. As if an upside-down world, “10 Steps to Financial Security” or “5 Ways to Heal Your Heart” offer comforting illusions of masterability and actionability.
Lists reduce Leviathan subjects to manageable morsels. Global warming is overwhelming, but “15 Easy Steps to a Lighter Carbon Footprint” is not. It doesn’t even matter if you actually do them or not; what’s important is the sense of control the list provides for the time being.
Your brain knows now why it’s a list lover: they save brain work, create completion craving through the Zeigarnik Effect, and bring calming order from sea-like information noise. Listicle psychology appeals to elemental forces in the way your brain works to complete tasks and stay in charge. You’re not clickbaited, you’re human.
Next time you see a numbered title, watch these forces in action. Awareness does not kill the craving, but it gives you the option to take control over which lists are an investment. Some listicles educate. Some listicles fish for clicks. Consider.
Read More: The Hidden History of Everyday Superstitions
