Study: Doom Messaging Gets Clicks, Fails to Spur Action — SkimNews
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- The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at seven minutes to midnight and now sits at 85 seconds, per the article, as a longtime example of crisis communication aimed at waking people from routine.
- Upworthy's A/B tests of 22,743 headlines showed each additional negative word boosted clicks by 2.3%, reinforcing what psychologists call the "negativity bias" in news consumption.
- A climate messaging study with 59,440 participants across 63 countries tested 11 message types; the doom-soaked passage was the most viral but the single worst at getting people to mitigate effects like planting trees.
- The "99% of expert climate scientists agree" consensus message outperformed every negative framing on every outcome measured except for online sharing.
- PhD student Danielle Goldwert found that highlighting the emotional benefits of climate action—hope and connection—significantly increased political participation, advocacy, donations, and lifestyle changes.
- Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently argued frontier AI models pose existential risk to humanity, cited as an example of the "doomer" camp the author argues can demobilize rather than galvanize.
Why it matters: Climate and AI-safety communicators now have empirical evidence across 63 countries that fear-based content optimizes for share metrics while suppressing the behavioral changes campaigns are designed to produce. Practitioners who rebalance toward consensus and hope-based framing have a tested alternative that moves people from passive scrolling to measurable action.
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