Exit
“negative news is more retweeted
than positive news.” But nonnewsy tweets, such as social updates, were shared more when they
were positive. The authors advised
people seeking out more followers
to “sweet talk your friends or serve
bad news to the public.”
Those who maintain that cheerful
trumps dreadful online frequently
cite the research of Wharton School
professor Jonah Berger, the author of “Contagion: Why Things
Catch On.” In one study, Berger and
his co-author Katherine Milkman
analyzed nearly 7,000 stories that
made it to The New York Times’
most-emailed list to figure out if
they could decode a pattern to the
articles’ popularity. They found
uplifting stories (i.e. “Wide-Eyed
New Arrivals Falling in Love with
the City”) were more viral than depressing ones. But “highly arousing
content,” like articles that induced
anxiety or anger, did best of all.
“Online content that evoked
high-arousal emotions was more
viral, regardless of whether those
emotions were of a positive (i.e.
awe) or negative (i.e. anger or anxiety) nature,” the researchers noted
— a conclusion echoed by a slew of
other studies. When emotionally
charged content gets readers agitat-
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ed, their instinct is to hit “share.”
These findings have major implications for our experience online, far beyond how to win more
followers. They suggest that social media can actually reward
— through its currency of shares,
retweets and “likes” — outbursts
of rage and anything that make us
agitated. Hype wins, nuance loses.
The problem with the viral nature of extreme emotions is that
Social media can actually
reward... outbursts of
rage and anything that
make us agitated.
we both ingest that content and
emulate it. If that’s what we share
then that’s what we’ll see, which in
turn will shape how we act. It’s not
a leap to suggest heated emotions
breed more heated emotions online,
or rage more rage. A study by Facebook’s data science team found that
if people used negative words, such
as “petty” or “lame,” in their status
updates, their friends became more
likely to include negative words in
their own posts. The bump in usage
persisted even three days after the
initial post, and the effect also applied to positive terms.