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Twitter and even email are some
of the most effective mechanisms
ever devised for spreading happy
stories. And there is some research
to support this: We’re incentivized
to share helpful, heartwarming and
hilarious things, since these make
us look good to our friends. The
language of Facebook and Twitter,
with “likes” and “favorites,” also
gives happy stuff a boost. “[N]euroscientists and psychologists have
found that good news can spread
faster and farther than disasters
and sob stories,” wrote The New
York Times’ John Tierney earlier
this year. The title of his piece declared, “Good News Beats Bad on
Social Networks.”
That sounds nice, only it’s not
entirely true. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Research published last month
by a team at China’s Beihang University concluded that anger was
more contagious than other emotions, spreading faster and more
widely online than sadness, disgust
and even joy. The scholars examined 70 million posts from China’s
Weibo, a Twitter-like service used
by more than 500 million people,
and tracked how people who interacted frequently with one another
influenced the emotional tone of
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each other’s posts. Did certain sentiments spread more quickly than
others? Would an angry message
posted by one person be more likely to prompt another angry post,
than, say, a depressing or happy
one? Absolutely, they concluded.
“We find the correlation of anger
among users is significantly higher
than that of joy, which indicates that
angry emotion could spread more
quickly and broadly in the network,”
the researchers wrote. The title of
their paper says it all: “Anger Is
More Influential Than Joy.”
A 2011 study that examined the
diffusion of sentiment across Twitter reached a similar conclusion,
albeit with an exception. The researchers found that in the domain
of news, bad news is viral news, or
HUFFINGTON
10.06.13
The “like”
button on
Facebook
seems to
encourage
the sharing
of positive
stories, but
researchers
have found
that negativity
may be more
contagious
than joy.