BackEmotional contagion
The Facebook experiment shows that emotional contagion is a fact of life, not only in the real world but also in our online behaviour
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Facebook put some of its users through an Orwellian experiment in 2012. The social media company tweaked its algorithm to alter what around 700,000 users saw on their news feed when they logged in. Some saw a news feed dominated by happy emotions. The rest were exposed to more of the sadder emotions. The experimenters noticed that the former group was more likely to post positive messages while the others mirrored the negativity they were surreptitiously exposed to.
The experiment has quite understandably angered privacy activists, but the broader lesson from the study is also worth noting. Human decisions are subject to biases and heuristics. The Facebook experiment shows that emotional contagion—what behavioural economists call the priming bias—is a fact of life, not only in the real world but also in our online behaviour.
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