Why Facebook fun is contagious
Dialogue Study suggests content of writers’ posts has a degree of influence on the emotional state of readers
Does reading a friend’s happy post on Facebook make you happier? According to research published in the
this week, we may well be affected by the emotional content we see every day on our Facebook feed.
But if we look a little closer at the study’s assumptions and methods we can see that the results are less than straightforward.
The research paper investigates the effects of “emotional contagion” within Facebook, and is the work of researchers from Cornell University, the University of California San Francisco and the Facebook research team. The theory of “emotional contagion” suggests that we pick up on other people’s emotional states and that our own emotional state can vary without our knowledge. This may seem commonsense, because if we think about it, when we encounter people in our everyday lives their good or bad moods can rub off on us.
So while “emotional contagion” may sound like more of a sickness, it is really just a metaphor for describing large-scale transfers of emotion.
This research addresses emotions in the context of Facebook, and because of this connection to Facebook, the research team had the luxury (academically speaking) of being able to access gigantic numbers of test subjects — nearly 690,000 people, in fact. Users of Facebook agree to this kind of experimentation as part of the terms of service.
The study involved the use of control and experimental groups set up for one week. All data was collected by computer and the researchers never saw the posts themselves. They solved this by setting up a pre-selected group of keywords which indicated a “positive” or “negative” emotional tone in a Facebook post, and having software compile the results into statistical data.
Facebook doesn’t control what you write, it controls what you see. To test how often their different groups would see posts that contained emotional words, researchers removed a proportion of the emotional posts to see if more emotional material would lead to users, in turn, making more emotional material.
The researchers found that removing a proportion of negative content from news feeds tended to make users post less negatively in the week that followed. Likewise, users whose news feed had fewer positive posts engaged in a less positive manner for that week. Simply put, if you see less bad stuff, you tend to say fewer bad things. While this might seem innocuous, the prospect of broadly affecting the way literally billions of people think is a fairly scary thought.
Fortunately, the effect that the researchers find is small. In fact, the total