NEWS30 June 2014
US — Facebook’s data science team, in conjunction with US scientists, have conducted an experiment on nearly 700,000 of the social media network’s to demonstrate “emotional contagion”.
The resulting paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America, showed that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness, and without direct interaction between users.
Facebook altered the tone of 689,003 people’s Facebook feed, without their knowledge, by reducing the number of posts containing either positive or negative emotions and monitoring the tone of subsequent posts produced by those users. It was found that when people saw fewer positive expressions of emotion on their news feed, they in turn produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts. The opposite pattern emerged when users saw fewer expressions of negative emotion.
“These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks,” the authors wrote.
The paper points out that the study was conducted using software that detects emotional language, meaning that no text was seen by researchers and, as such, was “consistent with Facebook’s data use policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research”. However, according to a story published on the Guardian news site, a number of researchers have condemned the experiment, claiming that it breaches the ethical guidelines for informed consent. The story quotes James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, who said: “The study harmed participants because it changed their mood.
“This is bad, even for Facebook.”