New Agora

What makes lists of items so compelling?

The "list" article was first perfected by the magazine industry -- particularly beauty magazines (Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, etc) and music/film magazines (Rolling Stone, Filmink etc). But it's now spreading into the mainstream media and is also very common on the Internet. There are now whole sites dedicated to producing N thing lists such as cracked.com (WARNING: clicking this link may waste a lot of your time).

But I recently ran across two interesting attempts to explain the psychology behind lists, both from the point of the writer and reader and the way that N item lists consistently attract higher traffic on the Internet.

From Paul Graham's essay:

Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay ... In a list of n things the writer agrees to constrain himself to a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he tells the reader explicitly what they are ... because the points are independent of one another, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship. If you get bored with, or can't understand, or don't agree with one point ... You can just abandon that one and skip to the next ...

The list of n things is easier for writers as well as readers ... What if you run out of ideas? The compartmentalized structure of the list of n things protects the writer from his own stupidity in much the same way it protects the reader. If you run out of ideas on one point, no problem: it won't kill the essay. You can take out the whole point if you need to, and the essay will still survive ...

There is one case where the list of n things is a dishonest format: when you use it to attract attention by falsely claiming the list is an exhaustive one. I.e. if you write an article that purports to be about the 7 secrets of success. That kind of title is the same sort of reflexive challenge as a whodunit ... It's fine to put "The" before the number if you really believe you've made an exhaustive list. But evidence suggests most things with titles like this are linkbait.

The greatest weakness of the list of n things is that there's so little room for new thought ... You make the title first, and that's what it's going to be about. You can't have more new ideas in the writing than will fit in the watertight compartments you set up initially.

Tremendous News provide 5 more reasons why the "linkbait" strategy works:

1. Numbers give us hope
2. We want to be angered
3. We feel like it’s simple enough for our dumbness
4. We love reading headings
5. We love an end

In particular, I think number 2 is interesting. It implies that presenting people with a list of items can switch them into an engaged mode of thought. What fits with their mental model and what doesn't?

Of course, this trick only works if people don't treat what is written as an authority. People have to see the list as a starting point for discussion. On the other hand, a list presented as the Ten Commandments (see? a list!) will stifle both discussion and individual thought.