ABSTRACT
In 2014, a paper with the title “Experimental evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Engineering (Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock 2014). The paper reported on research that had been done using 689,003 Facebook users. Seeking to determine whether the emotional content of users’ postings would be affected by the extent of positive or negative newsfeed the users received, the study involved three groups: one group had their newsfeed filtered for negative content; another group had their newsfeed filtered for positive content; and a third group had their newsfeed randomly filtered. Comparing the postings of the three groups, the researchers concluded that “moods are contagious.” Users who saw more positive newsfeed wrote more positive posts and users who saw more negative content wrote more negative posts. The study contradicted a concern and common belief that when users see a lot of positive content from their friends, it makes them depressed. 1
