Facebook has carried out an experiment among hundreds of thousands of users. A team of collaborators looked at how people reacted to a news feed, where a positive or negative posts were predominant. The users were not informed of the experiment.
A scientific reporting of the performed experiment appeared in the journal PNAS. Facebook did a study among a total of 689.003 persons, who are not aware of, and were randomly selected. The employees of Facebook experimented with the display of posts in the news feed of the users in the study were included.
There were two experiments conducted simultaneously: one in which the amount of negative posts in the news feed of an individual user was reduced, and one where the amount of positive posts in the news feed was reduced. Negativity and positivity were measured on the basis of keywords, for which special software was used.
Both experiments had a control group for comparison. If the outcome measure was the negativity or positivity of the posts that the user on Facebook put. So, the researchers wanted to see if there is a connection between the emotion to which someone is exposed to and the mood of the person.
The results show that there is what Facebook emotional contagiousness calls. If someone is exposed to negative posts, which are not necessarily sent to the user need, there is a greater chance that that person also reacts negatively. The same effect come the other way round: with more positivity reacted the user itself is also more positive. According to Facebook shows the experiment that emotions unconsciously ‘contagious’ can work.
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