9 ms·

Evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (2014) [pdf]

285 points by kick 7y ago

kseifried 7y ago
/msg Dave SCP-[REDACTED] is out again, can someone notify MTF-^$ to get on a disinformation campaign and cleanup?
kick 7y ago
Past coverage (though using the abstract at the time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 I think this is one of the most important, period-defining papers of the past ten years, and it seems like a shame how few people have read it.
- ahkurtz 7y ago
  Maybe people have read it but don't think renaming "ideas" and "empathy" to "emotional contagion" is particularly groundbreaking or constructive.
  - kick 7y ago
    The value of the paper is that it's where Facebook first started getting creative: a massive (N=689,00!), barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people. That's both groundbreaking and constructive, if constructive in a way that harms people who don't have Facebook stock. It set the stage for so much of what's happening today. Acting like it's just another boring paper is baffling.
    - knzhou 7y ago
      > barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people If you read the newspaper, watch TV, or read articles online, I have some bad news for you.
      - groby_b 7y ago
        You miss a crucial part - none of this are individually tailored to you. Social media is the first form of media that can deliver an individually customized payload.
    - inimino 7y ago
      Are you saying the paper itself is interesting, or that what the paper says about Facebook is interesting? The actual result (people who see positive or negative messages are more likely to post the same) seems so obvious and uninteresting as not to be worth mentioning at all, though the fact that Facebook was willing to run the experiment and publish the result is perhaps more notable.
      - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
        The context at the time was that some authors were making the argument that seeing positive posts on FB increased negative affect. This study, which was much larger, showed that this was not the case.
        inimino 7y ago
        Oh my. That would indeed be interesting, if only the method could even have a hope to show such a thing. From the abstract: > When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. Well and good, when people see more positive posts, they post more positively. But then: > This work also suggests that, [...] the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people. What a leap into the dark that is! This study cannot show anything about affect, only about what was measured, which is what people posted on Facebook.
        disgruntledphd2 7y ago
        Entirely agreed. But the previous study was a self-reported observational analysis, with appproximately 300 (German) participants. I'm not defending the study in general, but the context of the research is somewhat important.
    - omginternets 7y ago
      The subject is interesting, but there's barely any effect. Look at the d scores! >a massive (N=689,00!) Your critique reads like someone whose never done any research or serious statistical work. Big N's don't automatically mean the results are robust. I'm sorry, this isn't the groundbreaking paper you want it to be.
      - kick 7y ago
        Condescending remark aside, it's not important because of the effect or lack thereof; it's important because of how it was done.
        omginternets 7y ago
        Please consider that this stuff is very nuanced, and that while you clearly care about these issues a lot (as do I!), your analysis betrays a lack of understanding. Any way you want to cut it, these results are not to be trusted. You cannot even be sure the conclusions are true. The effect sizes are within measurement error.
        anigbrowl 7y ago
        You can gmail me if you want a more receptive ear for your thoughts on this paper and related subject matter.
  - tic_tac 7y ago
    It has an impact if singular events (of which there are millions each day) can severely affect social cohesion and stability. Regardless of what you call it, the inevitability of emotionally triggering events each of which has the potential to reach everyone in real time and impact them will lead to extreme social instability. Similarly, too many unregulated synaptic connections or overexcited neurons in the brain can cause seizures. How does it bode for society if, for example, every single instance of racial animosity between people is broadcast for the whole world to see? Even if the rate of occurrence of these sorts of interactions is incredibly small, there will be many per day, driving entire segments of our society apart and causing even more such negative interactions in the future which are just fuel for the fire.
    - MockObject 7y ago
      Crime is down but reporting is up, and therefore fear is too.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      Just leave people a venue to vent. Trying to purify every platform made the problem much, much worse in my opinion.
- omginternets 7y ago
  The effect size is barely a blip on the radar... This study is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Everyone in my lab was left scratching their heads that PNAS would publish such a weak result. If you think this is important or period-defining, you haven't been paying attention to the field.
  - kick 7y ago
    They created consent where there wasn't any, and attempted to sway the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people at once for the negative. It's not important for the effect, it's important and period-defining because A: it was the first publicly-admitted instance of Facebook actually using what they had to do harm (admitted to in a way that implied they didn't realize they had done harm), and B: because it laid out how the rest of the decade would look in regard to the behavior of tech companies. What you think about the study itself isn't the interesting part; statistics/psychology aren't actually science. It's the actions and motive found within of the researchers and company that are of interest.
    - omginternets 7y ago
      >They created consent where there wasn't any Well... maybe. The effect size is so weak, it barely did anything. To give you an idea: people's hunger-levels probably influenced them about 10x more than whatever Facebook was doing. I'm sorry, you're giving this study credit where none is due. Your conclusions are not supported by the evidence.
knzhou 7y ago
After getting burned in 2014 and then again in 2016, I'm sure Facebook has learned its lesson: never let social science researchers anywhere near the company. They don't actually do anything (effect size in this study is 0.1%, even though, as I personally checked in 2014, the filtering it used was the absolute crudest, strongest possible), but they can generate an infinite amount of bad press.
- c3534l 7y ago
  Ha! I can safely say that companies do not, in general, learn their lesson until it becomes an existential threat.
  - jordanbeiber 7y ago
    Companies are often filled with humans. It’s a human thing.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  You can bet that there are a lot of social science researchers within Facebook (I know at least two), but they've learned to never ever publish the results of that research and only use it to increase revenue.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    This a million times. All the public hysteria does is punish publication. The work goes on.
    - kohtatsu 7y ago
      It also leads people to leave the platform.
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      Hysteria around product experiments has had a big effect in education. As we all know, most online software companies conduct A/B tests to improve outcomes. IMO, education companies should do a/b testing in order to optimize student outcomes. It is unethical to not run tests. But, this can be described as "psychological manipulation" and "turning children into guinea pigs" -- and people freak. After all, there is not informed consent in A/B tests. Since educational software optimization does not actually lead to greater profit (the edu market is weird) the optimization work stops and no science is published. I find this disturbing. https://gizmodo.com/pearson-embedded-a-social-psychological-experiment-in-s-1825367784 https://gizmodo.com/pearson-embedded-a-social-psychological-...
dang 7y ago
There were a lot of threads about the Facebook experiment. I believe these are all related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7980743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7980743
emersonrsantos 7y ago
Blaming this on social networks is overdue, in my point of view. What about TV, books, music, arts, ideologies, religions? Yes, they play a part as massive as the social networks and were used (and studied) as a media for contagion. Then, it remains the question that what's different from an emotion that helps or harms people. Social networks acts in this way as a decentralised marketing tool, and totally vulnerable to non-organic manipulation.
- vaikrunta 7y ago
  I guess, it is just the speed and the ability to instantly go viral makes social networks more prone to bad press.
- nabla9 7y ago
  The difference is that social networks can see in real time how users react and what works.
  - mygo 7y ago
    There’s always been a feedback loop and new innovations to tighten it. ~100 years ago Macy’s started a radio show that enabled them to quickly put out new messaging to their (mostly female) audience and see how it affected shopping behaviour pretty much “instantly” when compared to their previous paradigm of running newspaper ads. They also saved $100,000/yr doing so — the equivalent of ~$1M/year in today’s currency — demonstrating how radio had significantly tightened their feedback loop when compared to newspaper. An artist can accomplish the same at a live show. With the artist seeing the response of a live audience (their focus group, in a way) while trying different things in real-time. This is how quite a few musical trends started. TV, books, music, arts have all had cash flows that are responsive to decisions.
    - cmehdy 7y ago
      The person you're replying to still has a point, that you probably reinforced with the example of Macy's: the time constants of a given feedback loop can and do influence greatly the necessary input (the money they saved) to get to a similar or better state (what you mention as tightening the feedback loop). The current world brings it down to a really small reaction time (i.e. the system can change dynamically within 1s, give or take an order of magnitude). I believe there is still room for even faster feedback loops (say, when a google-glass-like device reads in real-time a person's biometrics and feeds that to a system that optimizes what the user is interacting with), and I would not be surprised if Facebook already had considered that since they deal with VR devices (Oculus).
mjs33 7y ago
Humans can be easily influenced! Who knew!!! Next they’ll tell us not to lick metal poles when it’s cold out
unexaminedlife 7y ago
Periodically I've read articles / research that helps remind me that our physical bodies are the product of evolution that only recently began enjoying the fruits of a technological society. This article helped me recognize that our emotional states are also the product of that same evolutionary process. Only a few decades ago it was unheard of that people would be regularly conversing with others all over the globe from the comfort of their homes (or even more recently on their phones). Yet humans have been living on this planet and evolving to deal with the (mostly harsh) realities of life on earth for hundreds of thousands of years.
datashow 7y ago
This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psychology. There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%? The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".
- omginternets 7y ago
  Completely agree with you that the study is trash, however ... >but an unimportant journal in psychology. This is untrue. It's comically untrue. I was doing my PhD in cogsci when this came out and everybody was surprised that PNAS would publish such a bad study, given that we were more used to seeing things like this: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf and this https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf. PNAS has an _excellent_ reputation in psychology, especially in the psychophysics and EEG/MEG crowd.
  - conistonwater 7y ago
    PNAS does this sort of thing often enough, it doesn't really deserve its positive reputation (if any): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    Adam Kramer has a PhD in psychology, for what it's worth.
    - datashow 7y ago
      Thanks. Good to know.
  - datashow 7y ago
boyadjian 7y ago
Many people are acting like sheeps.
caetris1 7y ago
What most people don't know is that there is an actual science behind the mechanics of manipulating mass behavior using social networks. Sentiment analysis can be used with graph analytics to infer the emotional state of certain users to trigger state transitions towards more negative emotions. http://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/publications/2016-08-wisdom-Influence-Sentiment-Emotion.pdf http://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/publications/2016-08-w...
- mnky9800n 7y ago
  try convincing my phd adviser of this who for whatever reason doesn't believe it. lol.
  - caetris1 7y ago
    Here's everything you need with Java and Neo4j. You might need to swap out Google Cloud NLP, since it's prohibitively expensive for research. https://www.kennybastani.com/2019/09/sentiment-analysis-on-twitter-data.html https://www.kennybastani.com/2019/09/sentiment-analysis-on-t...
- amelius 7y ago
  Is there a relation between sad/depressed emotional state and buying behavior?
  - caetris1 7y ago
    I think that problem is a non-linear one. I'm pretty sure that it's not possible to predict the behavioral outcomes from the reactions of emotional states. The science only goes so far as to provide a proof that it's possible to polarize sentiment by identifying the community bridge in a network. That bridge would be the user that has optimal influence in both groups.
  - danesparza 7y ago
    There is definitely a correlation between pain perception and buying behavior. This has been documented in a study done by Carnegie Mellon: https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/practical/2007/winter/spending-til-it-hurts.shtml https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/practical/2007/winter/spending-... (spoiler alert: cash 'hurts more' to spend -- credit cards 'hurt much less') I'm sure that there is a correlation between emotion and the ability to perceive / numb pain -- so there probably (at least) an indirect correlation between emotion and buying behavior.
beardedman 7y ago
Contagion implies the user has no control once "infected", whereas in reality we all have the ability to 1) not be uncontrollably reactive, 2) close the tab & 3) thinking a little critically about the information being presented. I'm not saying the research is wrong, but I am saying that people can be a bit lazy about their mind.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Contagion implies the user has no control once "infected" No, it doesn't. Regular physical contagions leave the victim agency in treatments, lifestyle habits that improve/worsen prognosis, etc., much as you describe for the proposed emotional contagion. And are often worse in practice than they would be in a world of ideal people because people make suboptimal use of their agency, just as you describe is the case for the proposed emotional contagion. So, I'd say the metaphor is reasonable.
  - beardedman 7y ago
    Fair.
- Hokusai 7y ago
  > I am saying that people can be a bit lazy about their mind. Blaming the victims will not solve the problem. This is systemic problem and only broad changes in the system can fix it. I think that it helps if you realize that 1) People does not have access to the education that they need. We need to fix this. 2) People has many many problems to solve. So, that is why it is difficult to get focus to solve them. In isolation the problem seems simple enough. But, taking all the factors into account we cannot expect that everybody will solve the problem by themselves. And it does not seems very efficient either. To spend millions of person/hour on this is a waste when it can be solved in a better way.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
nabnob 7y ago
It's disappointing that so many comments are deriding the results of this study. I think this study is actually underestimating the effect of social contagion through social media, not just for emotional states but political views as well. While I think this type of social contagion happens through all forms of media, social media is highly individualist so I think the effect is slightly different. I don't think it's a coincidence that the explosion of identity politics over the past ten years lines up with rise of social media. This individualism is especially obvious with post-modernist leftists - just think of how many Twitter bios start off with listing someone's gender identity, mental illnesses, ethnicity, etc. Leftist social media is more of a subculture than an actual political movement, with no discussion or debate before ideas are treated as wrongthink.
cwoolfe 7y ago
I think this is pretty normal human behavior. If someone says to you "My father died yesterday," your response wouldn't be "Wow! The weather is great today!"
ajarmst 7y ago
I found the Editorial Expression of Concern on the last page of the post more interesting than the paper itself (the results might have been surprising in 2014, but in 2020 it reflects the mainstream view).

285 points by kick 7y ago

/msg Dave SCP-[REDACTED] is out again, can someone notify MTF-^$ to get on a disinformation campaign and cleanup?

kick 7y ago

Past coverage (though using the abstract at the time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 I think this is one of the most important, period-defining papers of the past ten years, and it seems like a shame how few people have read it.

ahkurtz 7y ago
Maybe people have read it but don't think renaming "ideas" and "empathy" to "emotional contagion" is particularly groundbreaking or constructive.
- kick 7y ago
  The value of the paper is that it's where Facebook first started getting creative: a massive (N=689,00!), barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people. That's both groundbreaking and constructive, if constructive in a way that harms people who don't have Facebook stock. It set the stage for so much of what's happening today. Acting like it's just another boring paper is baffling.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    > barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people If you read the newspaper, watch TV, or read articles online, I have some bad news for you.
    - groby_b 7y ago
      You miss a crucial part - none of this are individually tailored to you. Social media is the first form of media that can deliver an individually customized payload.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Are you saying the paper itself is interesting, or that what the paper says about Facebook is interesting? The actual result (people who see positive or negative messages are more likely to post the same) seems so obvious and uninteresting as not to be worth mentioning at all, though the fact that Facebook was willing to run the experiment and publish the result is perhaps more notable.
    - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      The context at the time was that some authors were making the argument that seeing positive posts on FB increased negative affect. This study, which was much larger, showed that this was not the case.
      - inimino 7y ago
        Oh my. That would indeed be interesting, if only the method could even have a hope to show such a thing. From the abstract: > When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. Well and good, when people see more positive posts, they post more positively. But then: > This work also suggests that, [...] the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people. What a leap into the dark that is! This study cannot show anything about affect, only about what was measured, which is what people posted on Facebook.
        disgruntledphd2 7y ago
        Entirely agreed. But the previous study was a self-reported observational analysis, with appproximately 300 (German) participants. I'm not defending the study in general, but the context of the research is somewhat important.
  - omginternets 7y ago
    The subject is interesting, but there's barely any effect. Look at the d scores! >a massive (N=689,00!) Your critique reads like someone whose never done any research or serious statistical work. Big N's don't automatically mean the results are robust. I'm sorry, this isn't the groundbreaking paper you want it to be.
    - kick 7y ago
      Condescending remark aside, it's not important because of the effect or lack thereof; it's important because of how it was done.
      - omginternets 7y ago
        Please consider that this stuff is very nuanced, and that while you clearly care about these issues a lot (as do I!), your analysis betrays a lack of understanding. Any way you want to cut it, these results are not to be trusted. You cannot even be sure the conclusions are true. The effect sizes are within measurement error.
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        You can gmail me if you want a more receptive ear for your thoughts on this paper and related subject matter.
- tic_tac 7y ago
  It has an impact if singular events (of which there are millions each day) can severely affect social cohesion and stability. Regardless of what you call it, the inevitability of emotionally triggering events each of which has the potential to reach everyone in real time and impact them will lead to extreme social instability. Similarly, too many unregulated synaptic connections or overexcited neurons in the brain can cause seizures. How does it bode for society if, for example, every single instance of racial animosity between people is broadcast for the whole world to see? Even if the rate of occurrence of these sorts of interactions is incredibly small, there will be many per day, driving entire segments of our society apart and causing even more such negative interactions in the future which are just fuel for the fire.
  - MockObject 7y ago
    Crime is down but reporting is up, and therefore fear is too.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Just leave people a venue to vent. Trying to purify every platform made the problem much, much worse in my opinion.
omginternets 7y ago
The effect size is barely a blip on the radar... This study is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Everyone in my lab was left scratching their heads that PNAS would publish such a weak result. If you think this is important or period-defining, you haven't been paying attention to the field.
- kick 7y ago
  They created consent where there wasn't any, and attempted to sway the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people at once for the negative. It's not important for the effect, it's important and period-defining because A: it was the first publicly-admitted instance of Facebook actually using what they had to do harm (admitted to in a way that implied they didn't realize they had done harm), and B: because it laid out how the rest of the decade would look in regard to the behavior of tech companies. What you think about the study itself isn't the interesting part; statistics/psychology aren't actually science. It's the actions and motive found within of the researchers and company that are of interest.
  - omginternets 7y ago
    >They created consent where there wasn't any Well... maybe. The effect size is so weak, it barely did anything. To give you an idea: people's hunger-levels probably influenced them about 10x more than whatever Facebook was doing. I'm sorry, you're giving this study credit where none is due. Your conclusions are not supported by the evidence.

knzhou 7y ago

After getting burned in 2014 and then again in 2016, I'm sure Facebook has learned its lesson: never let social science researchers anywhere near the company. They don't actually do anything (effect size in this study is 0.1%, even though, as I personally checked in 2014, the filtering it used was the absolute crudest, strongest possible), but they can generate an infinite amount of bad press.

c3534l 7y ago
Ha! I can safely say that companies do not, in general, learn their lesson until it becomes an existential threat.
- jordanbeiber 7y ago
  Companies are often filled with humans. It’s a human thing.
nostrademons 7y ago
You can bet that there are a lot of social science researchers within Facebook (I know at least two), but they've learned to never ever publish the results of that research and only use it to increase revenue.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  This a million times. All the public hysteria does is punish publication. The work goes on.
  - kohtatsu 7y ago
    It also leads people to leave the platform.
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    Hysteria around product experiments has had a big effect in education. As we all know, most online software companies conduct A/B tests to improve outcomes. IMO, education companies should do a/b testing in order to optimize student outcomes. It is unethical to not run tests. But, this can be described as "psychological manipulation" and "turning children into guinea pigs" -- and people freak. After all, there is not informed consent in A/B tests. Since educational software optimization does not actually lead to greater profit (the edu market is weird) the optimization work stops and no science is published. I find this disturbing. https://gizmodo.com/pearson-embedded-a-social-psychological-experiment-in-s-1825367784 https://gizmodo.com/pearson-embedded-a-social-psychological-...

dang 7y ago

There were a lot of threads about the Facebook experiment. I believe these are all related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7980743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7980743

emersonrsantos 7y ago

Blaming this on social networks is overdue, in my point of view. What about TV, books, music, arts, ideologies, religions? Yes, they play a part as massive as the social networks and were used (and studied) as a media for contagion. Then, it remains the question that what's different from an emotion that helps or harms people. Social networks acts in this way as a decentralised marketing tool, and totally vulnerable to non-organic manipulation.

vaikrunta 7y ago
I guess, it is just the speed and the ability to instantly go viral makes social networks more prone to bad press.
nabla9 7y ago
The difference is that social networks can see in real time how users react and what works.
- mygo 7y ago
  There’s always been a feedback loop and new innovations to tighten it. ~100 years ago Macy’s started a radio show that enabled them to quickly put out new messaging to their (mostly female) audience and see how it affected shopping behaviour pretty much “instantly” when compared to their previous paradigm of running newspaper ads. They also saved $100,000/yr doing so — the equivalent of ~$1M/year in today’s currency — demonstrating how radio had significantly tightened their feedback loop when compared to newspaper. An artist can accomplish the same at a live show. With the artist seeing the response of a live audience (their focus group, in a way) while trying different things in real-time. This is how quite a few musical trends started. TV, books, music, arts have all had cash flows that are responsive to decisions.
  - cmehdy 7y ago
    The person you're replying to still has a point, that you probably reinforced with the example of Macy's: the time constants of a given feedback loop can and do influence greatly the necessary input (the money they saved) to get to a similar or better state (what you mention as tightening the feedback loop). The current world brings it down to a really small reaction time (i.e. the system can change dynamically within 1s, give or take an order of magnitude). I believe there is still room for even faster feedback loops (say, when a google-glass-like device reads in real-time a person's biometrics and feeds that to a system that optimizes what the user is interacting with), and I would not be surprised if Facebook already had considered that since they deal with VR devices (Oculus).

mjs33 7y ago

Humans can be easily influenced! Who knew!!! Next they’ll tell us not to lick metal poles when it’s cold out

unexaminedlife 7y ago

Periodically I've read articles / research that helps remind me that our physical bodies are the product of evolution that only recently began enjoying the fruits of a technological society. This article helped me recognize that our emotional states are also the product of that same evolutionary process. Only a few decades ago it was unheard of that people would be regularly conversing with others all over the globe from the comfort of their homes (or even more recently on their phones). Yet humans have been living on this planet and evolving to deal with the (mostly harsh) realities of life on earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

datashow 7y ago

This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psychology. There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%? The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".

omginternets 7y ago
Completely agree with you that the study is trash, however ... >but an unimportant journal in psychology. This is untrue. It's comically untrue. I was doing my PhD in cogsci when this came out and everybody was surprised that PNAS would publish such a bad study, given that we were more used to seeing things like this: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/5/1672.full.pdf and this https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/2/619.full.pdf. PNAS has an _excellent_ reputation in psychology, especially in the psychophysics and EEG/MEG crowd.
- conistonwater 7y ago
  PNAS does this sort of thing often enough, it doesn't really deserve its positive reputation (if any): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=pnas
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  Adam Kramer has a PhD in psychology, for what it's worth.
  - datashow 7y ago
    Thanks. Good to know.
- datashow 7y ago

boyadjian 7y ago

Many people are acting like sheeps.

caetris1 7y ago

What most people don't know is that there is an actual science behind the mechanics of manipulating mass behavior using social networks. Sentiment analysis can be used with graph analytics to infer the emotional state of certain users to trigger state transitions towards more negative emotions. http://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/publications/2016-08-wisdom-Influence-Sentiment-Emotion.pdf http://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/publications/2016-08-w...

mnky9800n 7y ago
try convincing my phd adviser of this who for whatever reason doesn't believe it. lol.
- caetris1 7y ago
  Here's everything you need with Java and Neo4j. You might need to swap out Google Cloud NLP, since it's prohibitively expensive for research. https://www.kennybastani.com/2019/09/sentiment-analysis-on-twitter-data.html https://www.kennybastani.com/2019/09/sentiment-analysis-on-t...
amelius 7y ago
Is there a relation between sad/depressed emotional state and buying behavior?
- caetris1 7y ago
  I think that problem is a non-linear one. I'm pretty sure that it's not possible to predict the behavioral outcomes from the reactions of emotional states. The science only goes so far as to provide a proof that it's possible to polarize sentiment by identifying the community bridge in a network. That bridge would be the user that has optimal influence in both groups.
- danesparza 7y ago
  There is definitely a correlation between pain perception and buying behavior. This has been documented in a study done by Carnegie Mellon: https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/practical/2007/winter/spending-til-it-hurts.shtml https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/practical/2007/winter/spending-... (spoiler alert: cash 'hurts more' to spend -- credit cards 'hurt much less') I'm sure that there is a correlation between emotion and the ability to perceive / numb pain -- so there probably (at least) an indirect correlation between emotion and buying behavior.

beardedman 7y ago

Contagion implies the user has no control once "infected", whereas in reality we all have the ability to 1) not be uncontrollably reactive, 2) close the tab & 3) thinking a little critically about the information being presented. I'm not saying the research is wrong, but I am saying that people can be a bit lazy about their mind.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Contagion implies the user has no control once "infected" No, it doesn't. Regular physical contagions leave the victim agency in treatments, lifestyle habits that improve/worsen prognosis, etc., much as you describe for the proposed emotional contagion. And are often worse in practice than they would be in a world of ideal people because people make suboptimal use of their agency, just as you describe is the case for the proposed emotional contagion. So, I'd say the metaphor is reasonable.
- beardedman 7y ago
  Fair.
Hokusai 7y ago
> I am saying that people can be a bit lazy about their mind. Blaming the victims will not solve the problem. This is systemic problem and only broad changes in the system can fix it. I think that it helps if you realize that 1) People does not have access to the education that they need. We need to fix this. 2) People has many many problems to solve. So, that is why it is difficult to get focus to solve them. In isolation the problem seems simple enough. But, taking all the factors into account we cannot expect that everybody will solve the problem by themselves. And it does not seems very efficient either. To spend millions of person/hour on this is a waste when it can be solved in a better way.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

nabnob 7y ago

It's disappointing that so many comments are deriding the results of this study. I think this study is actually underestimating the effect of social contagion through social media, not just for emotional states but political views as well. While I think this type of social contagion happens through all forms of media, social media is highly individualist so I think the effect is slightly different. I don't think it's a coincidence that the explosion of identity politics over the past ten years lines up with rise of social media. This individualism is especially obvious with post-modernist leftists - just think of how many Twitter bios start off with listing someone's gender identity, mental illnesses, ethnicity, etc. Leftist social media is more of a subculture than an actual political movement, with no discussion or debate before ideas are treated as wrongthink.

cwoolfe 7y ago

I think this is pretty normal human behavior. If someone says to you "My father died yesterday," your response wouldn't be "Wow! The weather is great today!"

ajarmst 7y ago

I found the Editorial Expression of Concern on the last page of the post more interesting than the paper itself (the results might have been surprising in 2014, but in 2020 it reflects the mainstream view).