Emotional Contagion’s Effect on Facebook
Emotional Contagion is defined as the transference of an emotional state from one person to another without the recipient being aware of their newly inherited emotional state. Experiments in the past were only concerned with whether or not an emotional contagion can exist between people based off of their facial and physical cues. A group of researchers from Cornell and Facebook recently did a study, which tried to see if these cues were necessary for a contagion to spread. They randomly chose around 600,000 people from Facebook user database and manipulated their news feeds to show them mostly positive or mostly negative posts. They then tracked any posts made by these individuals to see if they were overwhelmingly positive or negative. They did in fact find significant data to show that people’s emotion were influenced by what they saw on their new feeds. This also showed that facial cues aren’t necessary for the spread of an emotional contagion.
This relates to many aspects of our course. One could easily see how one negative or positive post could lead to an information cascade. Once one person sees a positive post, he/she will post something positive, which will influence the next person who sees this post, and so on. This particular study received much criticism for its unethical use of Facebook users. The experiment was carried out without their knowledge, which is in direct violation of ethical rules for carrying out experiments.
Reference to Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full