Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report Protocol)

Kristina Gligorić, George Lifchits, Robert West and Ashton Anderson

PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: What makes written text appealing? In this registered report protocol, we propose to study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website Upworthy comparing multiple headline variants for the same news articles. This unique setup allows us to control for factors that can have crucial confounding effects on headline success. Based on prior literature and a pilot partition of the data, we formulate hypotheses about the linguistic features that are associated with statistically superior headlines. We will test our hypotheses on a much larger partition of the data that will become available after the publication of this registered report protocol. Our results will contribute to resolving competing hypotheses about the linguistic features that affect the success of text and will provide avenues for research into the psychological mechanisms that are activated by those features.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257091 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 57091&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0257091

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257091

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().