Numerals in news headlines act as an information-gateway signal, increasing engagement, perceived informativeness, and memory

People increasingly distrust news and engage with it irregularly. Can the presence of numbers in headlines encourage news engagement and, if so, why? We show that the presence (vs. absence) of at least one numeral (“3”) in tests of headlines increased click-throughs to associated articles by 3.6% at The Washington Post and 5.2% at Upworthy, after controlling for other engagement-related factors.

A preregistered experiment (n=765) demonstrated causal effects: Participants selected headlines with numerals more than those with verbal labels (“several”) or similarly precise, logically identical written-out numbers (“three”), suggesting that numerals were not simply more precise. Participants also formed more positive impressions of numeric headlines and remembered their number-related and non-numeric information better. Font-fluency manipulations did not moderate number-type effects, although did increase numeric memory.

We propose that the presence of numerals may act as a cognitive information-gateway signal influencing attention and encouraging engagement in noisy digital ecosystems. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are indicated in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.

Deidentified datasets and code for reproducibility purposes are at https://osf.io/gu5hz. However, Study 1a data cannot be made available because access to it was contingent on them not being publicly released. Per this agreement, data requestors should contact D.M.M., who will then refer interested parties to The Washington Post.

This project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (SES-2343329). Center for Science Communication Research, School of Journalism and Communication, Allen Hall, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403, OR, United States Ellen Peters, Brittany Shoots-Reinhard & Maxwell Ely Psychology Department, Straub Hall, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403, OR, United States Department of Communication, 404 Wilson Rd, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48824, MI, United States Psychology Department, 1827 Neil Ave, Ohio State University, Columbus, 43210, OH, United States The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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