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Negativity Reduced Positivity Reduced
Control
Experimental
Fig. 1. Mean number of positive (Upper) and negative (Lower) emotion words
(percent) generated people, by condition. Bars represent standard errors.
Kramer et al. PNAS | June 17, 2014 | vol. 111 | no. 24 | 8789
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one from its effects. Second, although nonverbal behavior is well
established as one medium for contagion, these data suggest that
contagion does not require nonverbal behavior (7, 8): Textual
content alone appears to be a sufficient channel. This is not
a simple case of mimicry, either; the cross-emotional encourage-
ment effect (e.g., reducing negative posts led to an increase in
positive posts) cannot be explained by mimicry alone, although
mimicry may well have been part of the emotion-consistent effect.
Further, we note the similarity of effect sizes when positivity and
negativity were reduced. This absence of negativity bias suggests
that our results cannot be attributed solely to the content of the
post: If a person is sharing good news or bad news (thus explaining
his/her emotional state), friends response to the news (in-
dependent of the sharers emotional state) should be stronger
when bad news is shown rather than good (or as commonly noted,
if it bleeds, it leads; ref. 12) if the results were being driven by
reactions to news. In contrast, a response to a friends emotion
expression (rather than news) should be proportional to exposure.
A post hoc test comparing effect sizes (comparing correlation
coefficients using Fishers method) showed no difference de-
spite our large sample size (z = 0.36, P = 0.72).
We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were ex-
posed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News
Feed were less expressive overall on the following days, ad-
dressing the question about how emotional expression affects
social engagement online. This observation, and the fact that
people were more emotionally positive in response to positive
emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories
that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may
somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison
(6, 13). In fact, this is the result when people are exposed to less
positive content, rather than more. This effect also showed no
negativity bias in post hoc tests (z = 0.09, P = 0.93).
Although these data provide, to our knowledge, some of the
first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims
that emotions can spread throughout a network, the effect sizes
from the manipulations are small (as small as d = 0.001). These
effects nonetheless matter given that the manipulation of the
independent variable (presence of emotion in the News Feed)
was minimal whereas the dependent variable (peoples emo-
tional expressions) is difficult to influence given the range of
daily experiences that influence mood (10). More importantly,
given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook,
even small effects can have large aggregated consequences (14,
15): For example, the well-documented connection between
emotions and physical well-being suggests the importance of
these findings for public health. Online messages influence our
experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline
behaviors. And after all, an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebooks
scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corre-
sponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in
status updates per day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank the Facebook News Feed team, especially
Daniel Schafer, for encouragement and support; the Facebook Core Data
Science team, especially Cameron Marlow, Moira Burke, and Eytan Bakshy;
plus Michael Macy and Mathew Aldridge for their feedback. Data processing
systems, per-user aggregates, and anonymized results available upon request.
1. Hatfield E, Cacioppo JT, Rapson RL (1993) Emotional contagion. Curr Dir Psychol Sci
2(3):96100.
2. Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network:
Longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study. BMJ 337:a2338.
3. Rosenquist JN, Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2011) Social network determinants of de-
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4. Cohen-Cole E, Fletcher JM (2008) Is obesity contagious? Social networks vs. environ-
mental factors in the obesity epidemic. J Health Econ 27(5):13821387.
5. Aral S, Muchnik L, Sundararajan A (2009) Distinguishing influence-based contagion
from homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA
106(51):2154421549.
6. Turkle S (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from
Each Other (Basic Books, New York).
7. Guillory J, et al. (2011) Upset now? Emotion contagion in distributed groups. Proc
ACM CHI Conf on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Association for Computing
Machinery, New York), pp 745748.
8. Kramer ADI (2012) The spread of emotion via Facebook. Proc CHI (Association for
Computing Machinery, New York), pp 767770.
9. Pennebaker JW, Chung CK, Ireland M, Gonzales A, Booth RJ (2007) The development
and psychological properties of LIWC2007. Available at http://liwc.net/howliwcworks.
php. Accessed May 10, 2014.
10. Golder SA, Macy MW (2011) Diurnal and seasonal mood vary with work, sleep, and
daylength across diverse cultures. Science 333(6051):18781881.
11. Thusoo A; Facebook Data Infrastructure Team (2009) HiveA warehousing solution
over a map-reduce framework. Proc VLDB 2(2):16261629.
12. Baumeister RF, Bratslavsky E, Finkenauer C, Vohs KD (2001) Bad is stronger than good.
Rev Gen Psychol 5(4):323370.
13. Festinger L (1954) A theory of social comparison processes. Hum Relat 7(2):117140.
14. Prentice DA, Miller DT (1992) When small effects are impressive. Psychol Bull 112(1):
160164.
15. Bond RM, et al. (2012) A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and
political mobilization. Nature 489(7415):295298.
8790 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111 Kramer et al.