[LINK] "Good News Beats Bad News on Social Networks"

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

SCIENCE FINDINGS:

"Good News Beats Bad News on Social Networks"

By JOHN TIERNEY, March 18, 2013 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/science
/good-news-spreads-faster-on-twitter-and-facebook.html?ref=science>

BAD NEWS SELLS. 

If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning 
papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the 
gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, 
fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the 
more coverage.

But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, 
researchers are discovering new rules. 

By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, 
neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread 
faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune 
in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of 
Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. 
But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more 
how they react.”

Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication — e-mails, Web posts and 
reviews, face-to-face conversations — found that it tended to be more 
positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred 
positive news. 

Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more 
good things than bad things?

To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a 
particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York 
Times’s Web site. He and Katherine Milkman, a Penn colleague, analyzed the 
“most e-mailed” list for six months, controlling for factors like how much 
display an article received in different parts of the home page.

One of his first findings to be reported — which I still consider the most 
important social-science discovery of the past century — was that articles 
and columns in the Science section were much more likely to make the list 
than nonscience articles. He found that science aroused feelings of awe and 
made Times readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that 
inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not articles that 
left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and 
they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more 
likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, 
“Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”

“Stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City,” he writes, 
were more likely to be e-mailed than “pieces that detailed things like the 
death of a popular zookeeper.” Debbie Downer is apparently no match for 
Polly Positive, at least among Times readers.

In another attempt to understand what’s buzzworthy, neuroscientists have 
scanned the brains of people while they hear about new ideas. Then, as 
these people told others about what they had heard, the scientists observed 
which ideas spread and which didn’t.

You might predict that people would pass along the most memorable ideas — 
the ones that lighted up the brain regions associated with encoding and 
retrieving memories. But that’s not what happened in the experiments, which 
were conducted by Emily Falk along with colleagues at the University of 
Michigan and researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The best predictors of buzz were elsewhere, in the brain regions associated 
with social cognition — thoughts about other people. If those regions 
lighted up when something was heard, people were more likely to talk about 
the idea enthusiastically, and the idea would keep spreading.

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful 
in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. 
“But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what 
appeals to others may be even more important.”

This social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing 
information about their favorite subject of all: themselves. This is 
intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with 
rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study by Diana Tamir and Jason 
Mitchell of Harvard. In fact, the study showed, it’s so pleasurable that 
people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about 
themselves.

Past research into everyday conversation showed that a third of it is 
devoted to oneself, but today that topic has become an obsession thanks to 
social media. Rutgers researchers classify 80 percent of Twitter users as 
"meformers" who tweet mainly about themselves.

The result is even more Polly Positivity, and not just because people are 
so adept at what psychologists call self-presentation: pointing out one’s 
own wonderfulness. While people have always said nice things about 
themselves in traditional conversations and saved the nastier comments for 
others, today they’re more diligent in spreading the word through written 
media like e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

“In most oral conversations, we don’t have time to think about exactly the 
right thing to say,” Dr. Berger explains. “We fill conversational spaces by 
saying what’s top of mind. But when you write something, you have the time 
to construct and refine what you say, so it involves more self-
presentation.”

Dr. Berger’s experiments have shown that people say more positive things 
when they’re talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person — a 
result that helps explain the relentlessly perfect vacations that keep 
showing up on Facebook.

But does all this positivity actually make the audience feel any better? 
Not necessarily. A study in Utah showed that the longer people spend on 
Facebook, the more they think that life is unfair and that they’re less 
happy than their “friends.”

Similar results were observed in Germany by a team led by Hanna Krasnova, 
which recently reported a “rampant nature of envy” and other “invidious 
emotions” among heavy users of Facebook.

“The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on social networking sites is 
shown to undermine users’ life satisfaction,” the German researchers 
conclude, describing this phenomenon as “the self-promotion-envy spiral.”

That spiral hardly sounds like a positive trend, but there’s probably a 
quick way to reverse it: turn on the television. Mass-media producers and 
editors have always known a reliable way to assuage envy. Once they’ve 
scoured the globe to bring calamity and chaos into the living room, even 
the most miserably unhappy couch potato knows that there is someone, 
somewhere, doing worse.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2013, on page D3 
of the New York edition with the headline: Good News Beats Bad on Social 
Networks.
--

Cheers,
Stephen



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