These Scientists Studied Why Internet Stories Go Viral. You Won't Believe What They Found
Science
confirms what Buzzfeed and Upworthy already know: In the hierarchy of
digital contagion, content that evokes powerful emotions floats
mercilessly to the top.
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal profiledGawker
editor Neetzan Zimmerman, whose job is to post content that's poised to
go viral. Zimmerman does his job quite well. His posts generate about 30 million pageviews a month--tops
at the site by far, six times what the second-leading staffer
generates. Zimmerman's success is not the result of some computer
formula; on the contrary, rather, "he understands the emotions that
might compel a human being to click on something online," the Journal's Farhad Manjoo writes.
If the traffic numbers don't already show the wisdom of Zimmerman's
approach, the behavioral evidence certainly does. Recent research
suggests that emotions hold the secret to viral web content. Articles,
posts, or videos that evoke positive emotions have greater viral
potential than something that evokes negative feelings, but both do a
better job recruiting clicks than neutral content. The finer details
tell a similar story: triggering high-arousal emotions, such as anger or
humor, is a surer path to click gold than triggering low-arousal ones,
such as contentment or sadness.
Take a recent a study published in the November issue of Computers in Human Behavior. A research team led by Rosanna E. Guadagno
of the National Science Foundation showed 256 test participants one
video from a collection that spanned the emotional spectrum. Some saw a cute or funny clip that had gone viral on YouTube. Others saw a hit that evoked anger or disgust. Still others saw a neutral video about basket-weaving.
After the viewing, participants were asked whether or not they would
share that video with someone else. Those who'd seen the funny or cute
video were significantly more likely to say they'd forward it than any
of the other test participants. Those who'd seen the video causing anger
or disgust were significantly more likely to say the same than those
who'd seen the neutral clip. A follow-up test with 163 more participants
found the same pattern of viral potential: positive emotions best
negative ones, any emotion bests none at all.
Part of what makes emotional content so susceptible to spreading is
that emotions themselves are contagious. Researchers have long known
that people can "catch" the emotions of someone around them, so to
speak, through direct exposure to that person's expressions and tones
and gestures. They also believe this process of emotional contagion can occur indirectly--say, by receiving a forwarded video clip or article.
The physiological arousal produced by certain emotions may also help
explain why some web content goes viral and some doesn't. A few years
ago, Wharton behavioral scholars Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman analyzed roughly 7,000 articles that appeared on the New York Times
website to see which ones made the "most emailed" list. After
controlling for factors like page prominence and author fame, the
researchers found that emotional content indeed went viral more often
than non-emotional pieces.
But Berger and Milkman didn't stop their analysis there. Within the
emotional articles, they recognized that content evoking high-arousal
emotions (in this case, awe, anger, and anxiety, emotions that tend to
whip us into action) went viral more often than articles evoking a
low-arousal emotion (sadness, an emotion that often leaves us subdued).
The odds that an article would end up on the "most emailed" list
increased 34% when it elicited one standard deviation more anger, the
equivalent of letting the article spend an extra 3 hours as the lead
story on the Times website.
Berger, author of the 2013 book Contagious: Why Things Catch On,
extended this finding even further during a separate laboratory study.
He asked some test participants to sit still before reading a neutral
article, and asked others to jog in place for a minute before reading
the same piece. Then he gave both groups the option of emailing the
article to someone else. Three-quarters of the joggers forwarded it
against only a third of the sitters--a further sign, in Berger's eyes,
that arousal plays a major role in social transmission.
"More arousing content should be more likely to spread quickly on the
Internet and should be more likely to capture public attention," he
concluded in Psychological Science.
Knowing that emotional arousal contributes to digital contagion
should help designers and other creative types craft catchier content
(if that's their goal). Public officials might take note, too,
especially as they try to distribute information through service
announcements that tend to be dry by nature. A public health spot that
evokes sadness, for instance, may be less likely to make the rounds than
something that causes angst or indignation--though both should be more
effective than something safe.
Then again, many factors influence whether or not something goes
viral. Interesting content is a must, and catching the eye of a major
Twitter personality can't hurt. A heavy marketing push can also boost a
video's exposure; (in fact, one of Neetzan Zimmerman's biggest fears,
according to the Journal, is that advertisers will co-opt viral
news). And, of course, there's the difficulty in evoking strong
feelings in the first place. It's one thing to understand the emotions
that compel a person to click. It's another thing entirely to produce
them.
(¯`*• Global Source and/or more resources at http://goo.gl/zvSV7 │ www.Future-Observatory.blogspot.com and on LinkeIn Group's "Becoming Aware of the Futures" at http://goo.gl/8qKBbK │ @SciCzar │ Point of Contact: www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini
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