Imagine that you are visiting my hometown of Seattle next weekend and turn to your favorite search engine to help you plan the trip. Maybe you search for “Seattle tourist attractions,” “restaurants in Ballard,” or “live music in Capitol Hill.”
No matter your search query, the odds are high that you’ll come across a list within the first few search results, such as “25 Top Things to Do in Seattle” or “The Best Restaurants In Ballard.” Why? It turns out that lists and rankings are a popular and effective way to convey information. And because people just can’t seem to get enough of them, many of the content creators who are competing for our eyeballs—from influencers to content marketers to media entities—have become list-makers themselves.
Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece for Poets&Quants about ranked lists (cross-posted to my Psychology Today blog) focusing specifically on their prevalence, especially online. If anything, lists—which can be defined as a set of connected and typically ranked items that are presented consecutively—are even more ubiquitous now than ever before. As evidence, look no further than books with titles such as The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists or The Curious Book of Lists—or the rankings that proliferate across the media that cover graduate business education, like P&Q. There’s also the website Ranker.com, which includes over 100,000 lists and garners over 30 million unique visitors each month—and there’s even a Wikipedia entry for “a list of lists of lists,” which contains a list of webpages that are actually lists of other list articles.
In my last piece, I highlighted a........