Evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.abstract

by danso • 12 years ago

100 36 12 years ago

pitchups• 12 years ago

Sometimes one can't help but wonder if the long term impact of everyone being connected, all the time, is not going to be one planet-scale hive mind!

chenelson• 12 years ago

Hodos ano kato.

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

The same probably applies to TV, radio, newspapers, novels, and plays. So I don't think anyone should panic.

leorocky• 12 years ago

I've read about studies where just seeing someone else smile and be happy makes others who see it also happier. Like a happy person gets on a bus full of less than happy people and the entire bus ends up happier. I don't think this is really that new, except maybe to the degree it scales the distribution. I imagine words create a smaller impact than a face to face encounter, but I'll leave that to a study to figure out.

bphogan• 12 years ago

The person who mentored me when I first became a college instructor mentioned the importance of appearing warm and engaging on the first day to remove anxiety of the new students. There's probably some truth to that "just seeing someone else smile" thing.

mjklin• 12 years ago

Good old P-nas

jbattle• 12 years ago

It seems far more plausible people are picking up behavioral norms than being emotionally influenced. If none of your friends ever complain on facebook, are you going to be the one "grump"? I didnt read the study admittedly but this feels off. I thought it was axiomatic by now that what people post to facebook is 90% about how people want to be percieved, not who they really are.

jmromer• 12 years ago

I think that heuristic attributes more foresight to people than they actually exercise in practice. It's more like the impressions one anticipates making on others create incentives and disincentives that shape behavior...but this applies offline as well. Even IRL, everyone's behavior tends to be bounded by "how people want to be perceived, not who they really are."

msane• 12 years ago

Sure, the reason why people replicate each other's sentiments is often to be normative. The interesting part about publicly expressed sentiments though is that they tend to be subconsciously adopted by those expressing them even in the case of initial insincerity. This is essentially Cialdini's consistency principle.

danso• 12 years ago

There's a related test that is far more basic, and more directly relevant to Facebook's bottom line, that must have been studied at some point: does seeing good/negative things in the newsfeed affect a user's re-visit behavior? If I had to take a cynical guess, I would guess that negativity, and even tragedy, would draw people in more...for the same reason that conflict makes both fiction and non-fiction media interesting.

I'm also going to cynically guess that Facebook has probably studied this but probably doesn't find it in their best interest to reveal the optimal mix of emotion.

Although positivity/negativity may be a minor factor compared to the other factors that influence what shows up on your feed...for me, my feed seems to be heavily weighted toward: "the last 20 people you've interacted with on Facebook"

Swizec2• 12 years ago

for me, my feed seems to be heavily weighted toward: "the last 20 people you've interacted with on Facebook"

Lucky. For me it's more like "the last 34543532514543254 brands you happened to glance at, oh and you have like 3 friends who sometimes post stuff too"

Except for profile picture changes. You see every single bloody profile picture change. Every single one of them.

Swizec2• 12 years ago

Breaking news: human culture spreads through social contact.

It's almost like we're social animals or something. Although granted, it's very interesting that with modern distribution methods the effects can span continents rather than villages.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

You'd say the 'social' in social networks would give the game away.

ivv• 12 years ago

The study basically concludes that reading sad stuff makes one sad, which in turn makes one post stuff that is also sad. The unique thing about it is that one is both a reader and an author. Otherwise, movie and TV studios have been testing and tweaking movies for a particular emotional effect since forever.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Although perhaps more importantly that constant exposure to emotional bias can put that bias in you. There was a much less credible study of whether or not watching Fox News made you more conservative (the unspoken threat there was that watching any consistently biased narrative would align you to that narrative) but the Facebook study has better statistics.

So one wonders if all the kids programming is consistently biased towards some topic, will it bias that generation? Sort of a weird inception sort of hypothesis.

For me it just confirmed my own experience that being around people who are sad makes me feel sad (not sure if I'm sad for them or me, but what ever) and so being optimistic around people might keep them going. But again not a lot of science there.

shawn-butler• 12 years ago

>> As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research >>

Wait, what?

judk• 12 years ago

It's a shame that a reputable journal accepted the bogus claim of "informed consent". Not a big deal in an observational study like this, but sets a horrible precedent for EULA-based fraudulent claims of informed consent.

cjbprime• 12 years ago

PNAS' policies[1] say that experiments on humans must go through review by an ethics board before they will publish them, so it's especially strange that PNAS published this without any apparent review (none is mentioned in the paper). It's not up to the researchers to decide whether informed consent was obtained, it's up to the ethics board.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/site/authors/journal.xhtml (vii)

tomjen3• 12 years ago

Where do you complain, though? Do you write a stern letter to the editor?

GrumpySimon2• 12 years ago

Having submitted to that journal before, I suspect the authors just ticked a check box that said something like "Relevant ethics approval was obtained for this paper".

jtwaleson2• 12 years ago

Oh wow, what if someone in the negatively influenced group committed suicide? It would be unlikely that the tinkering actually caused the suicide, but the media would probably jump to this conclusion quickly.

GrumpySimon2• 12 years ago

Or flip it around - what if the next time Facebook sees you post 5 negative things in a row, it decides to positively skew what it shows you? i.e. trying to cheer up depressed people and stop suicide. It's creepy, eh?

jtwaleson2• 12 years ago

Both sides are really creepy. A possible benefit of this experiment is gaining more insight into detecting whether people are happy or sad. Advertisers might soon be able to adapt their ads to a user's mood, thereby reinforcing the artificial connection between the company and the user. Users will feel like the brand really understands them.

nardi• 12 years ago

This study has an enormous sample size, but an incredibly small effect. They're measuring effects of less than 0.1%. Admittedly, they have the statistical power to do this, but it's not a very impressive result. "Reading Others' Emotional Posts on Social Networks Can Very, Very Slightly Affect Your Mood" doesn't sound as cool.

pknight5• 12 years ago

A "small" effect size doesn't make it any less interesting or less impressive. If anything it underlines how even the most trivial human interactions can make a meaningful impact, positively or negatively.

thaumasiotes4• 12 years ago

Huh? A small effect size is the opposite of a meaningful impact.

textient• 12 years ago

We believe this is a significant finding . The contagion effect should be seriously looked at by organisations/brand which is engaging its (prospective) customers significantly through social media channels for marketing, campaigns and reputation management. A number of organisations today are involved in setting up dedicated customer care handles on FB,Twitter,G+ so on..

Social media is increasingly transferring the power to the end users/customers. Perhaps it's high time for organisations to make sure that their business creates either a positive or a negative contagion effect on FB and other social channels.

The contagion effect also means that probably we have more work to do on Social media monitoring and analysis front going forward!

dschiptsov• 12 years ago

Wanna see emotional contagion? Try /b/.

Evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

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