3 Reasons Things Are Published In List Form

Ever wonder why so many articles preemptively claim to have a finite and measurable number of things to communicate to you? Consider these reasons.

1. We've Been Trained To Understand Things In Hierarchies

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You're reading this from top to bottom and left to right, aren't you? The simple notion that you encounter one nugget of information before another suggests—even if it's not true—that what you read first is important for understanding the things that come after it; without a cornerstone, the rest of the building falls apart.

Even though that might not be true for a list, we've been taught that it might be true regardless. So you may not care about #1, but you still have to scroll past it to get to #3, which suggests that maybe you should care about it.

2. You're More Likely To Read All Of A List

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Research has shown that, while reading on the Internet, users are more likely to read (or scan, rather) in an F-shaped formation, instead of actually reading lines all the way to the end. Ever wonder why websites often place pictures or advertisements on the right-hand side of their articles? It's because, if they had put part of the article there, you'd be less likely to actually read it.

This goes back to the hierarchy bit as well because the important information is often front-loaded anyway, so everything after that is scanned and read only if interest is piqued during the scanning process. And, if you know how many numbered units of information the article intends to communicate before you set out to read the article, you're probably more likely to actually read everything the piece has to offer, I guess.

3. We Like To Trust Multi-Media Information

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Though you might not think about it, numbering chunks of written word and combining them with pictures and gifs is like making something "multi-media." The content's medium is more controlled by the author because the information includes more visual cues than just blocks of text.

It's like when Ronald Reagan would show up on television with a graph to talk to the American people about money and their taxes (and not talk about AIDS or drugs or how he plans to exacerbate structural racism by sticking his nose in the Fair Housing Act, which worked in like the total opposite way it was supposed to because white people and because politics (but that's not a discussion for right now because I'm being too circuitous and I'm supposed to be direct because this is a list isn't it?)).

The graph Reagan sits in front of might not be right—you may have no idea what he's talking about—but the mixture of different media to convey the same information gives us the sense that we understand the information better, even if we don't. When information is numbered and branded as THE three reasons listicles exist, it's also made to look more definitive. Like these are really THE 3 ways to understand why we like reading information in list-form, even though there are a multitude of different reasons and sub-reasons and sub-sub-reasons why numbered lists appeal to socialized senses, or really why anything happens in certain ways instead of others.