
Evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks (2014) [pdf] - kick
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf
======
caetris1
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-w...](http://keg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/jietang/publications/2016-08-wisdom-
Influence-Sentiment-Emotion.pdf)

~~~
amelius
Is there a relation between sad/depressed emotional state and buying behavior?

~~~
danesparza
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-...](https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/practical/2007/winter/spending-
til-it-hurts.shtml) (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.

~~~
cortesoft
I wonder if that will hold as people use cash less often... if you grow up
only using credit cards and have no association with paper money having value,
will this study no longer be true? Most adults at the time the study was done
probably were still using cash for most purchases for most of their life,
making that association stronger.

~~~
danesparza
An excellent question. I only have anecdotal evidence to indicate that it
continues to hold up. (My family and I continue to use cash for many
purchases. I'm a man in my 40's)

~~~
cortesoft
My anecdotal evidence is the opposite... I have basically used credit cards
for 95% of purchases the last 5-10 years, and cash feels like 'extra' money to
me now... since it doesn't show up in my tracking systems, I don't really see
where it is going... I don't have to ever look at the spend again after I buy
something, so it induces less guilt... I feel like I want to get rid of the
cash in my wallet, because it is 'wasted' in my wallet.

------
knzhou
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.

~~~
nostrademons
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
This a million times. All the public hysteria does is punish publication. The
work goes on.

~~~
dr_dshiv
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-...](https://gizmodo.com/pearson-embedded-a-social-
psychological-experiment-in-s-1825367784)

~~~
gbear605
The problem is that when you run a/b tests, the changed case is often worse.
If the thing being tested is a website, that might not be so bad. If the thing
being tested is your education, that might be horrible.

~~~
mygo
No need to a/b test when there are tens of thousands of universities in the
world all doing slightly different things. The cream rises and then is copied.

For example, FSU recently went up in rankings from a ~#50 public university to
a #18 public university year over year over the past decade. Whatever changes
they put into place are now being studied by other universities and if there’s
anything novel that they’re doing, it will likely become more widespread as
other universities seeking higher rankings implement new things. Or, it could
be possible that the university studied the success of other universities and
implemented what worked best and stopped what wasn’t. You run an a/b test when
there aren’t already tens of thousands of other colleges and universities like
yourself out there that you can study and learn from.

Of course, rankings DNE educational quality, but it’s one example. Another
example, that may have a better correlation with educational quality (although
part of the equation is the constitution of the cohort) may be bar exam pass
rates for law school grads listed by law school.

~~~
dr_dshiv
> No need to a/b test when there are tens of thousands of universities in the
> world all doing slightly different things. The cream rises and then is
> copied.

Why would it be any different in webtech or advertising? Why wouldn't everyone
just copy the best vs gathering empirical data?

~~~
mygo
Are universities not gathering empirical data when they study the results of
others’ efforts at scale? Study being the key word in that scenario, it’s more
than just copying what they see, but understanding why it’s effective, and if
it would be for them.

And it may be quicker and more reliable with less risk than A/B testing in
their setting. The most highly trafficked web tech companies can gather
statistically significant feedback data about a change in moments. A/B testing
a curriculum or educational practice could take a semester or more, and then
the risks are higher — it would be a two-sided hypothesis test where the B
group could not only do better, but could also do much worse, and it would
reflect poorly on the institution if so. People are paying tens of thousands
of dollars per seat per year for the best education they can get. Seeing how
many items are in the shopping cart right on the “checkout” button doesn’t
really reflect poorly on Amazon, but it could help Amazon increase conversion
rates by .03%, which could mean millions of dollars at their scale, and they
could also complete the test fairly quickly given their volume (in a day or
so?) at a 99.7% confidence interval.

With that being said, I’m sure that smaller scale or faster turnaround time
A/B tests are being ran at Uni’s.

------
dang
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)

------
nabnob
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.

------
unexaminedlife
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.

------
emersonrsantos
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.

~~~
nabla9
The difference is that social networks can see in real time how users react
and what works.

~~~
mygo
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
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).

~~~
mygo
Right on :)

But I guess what I’m getting at is, this isn’t anything new. The media has
always been an effective social engineering tool, whether or not the social
engineers at the time were aware of it. And the last few instances where
faster feedback loops via more effective media helped one company get ahead
didn’t spark the end of the world. Not unless newspapers were the beginning of
the end. And then radio. And then video. And then TV. And then netflix and
social media. And then the screens that we’ll put on behind our eyelids so
that we can watch our favorite shows without opening our eyes, or whatever
facebook is cooking up.

------
cwoolfe
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!"

------
beardedman
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
> 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
Fair.

------
kick
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
Maybe people have read it but don't think renaming "ideas" and "empathy" to
"emotional contagion" is particularly groundbreaking or constructive.

~~~
kick
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
> 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
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.

------
ajarmst
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).

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

------
datashow
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
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.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Adam Kramer has a PhD in psychology, for what it's worth.

~~~
datashow
Thanks. Good to know.

------
mjs33
Humans can be easily influenced! Who knew!!! Next they’ll tell us not to lick
metal poles when it’s cold out

