First, the assignment started out by reading a definition of emotional contagion, and watching a TED talk on the influence of social networks. After this, we had to read 2 articles and a cartoon about a Facebook study where they took advantage of emotional contagion by manipulating people’s feeds. After this, we had to post on the discussion board, including a definition of emotional contagion, an example of emotional contagion from non-internet social networks, describe the Kramer study and what it found, if we thought the study was ethical, and speculate about whether we’ve ever consciously felt emotional contagion on the Internet.
In my discussion board post, I described emotional contagion as the spreading of similar emotions from one person to another. It can happen with positive or negative emotions, and in a pair or in a crowd.
My example of emotional contagion from non-internet social networks was if a friend of yours is happy and positive and is smiling at you, when spending time with him you may become happy too. Or, if a few of your friends are very mad about something that happened recently, and you are with them, you may become mad, even though you weren’t involved in whatever happened.
The articles and cartoon described that the Kramer study manipulated people’s Facebook feeds to make them slightly more positive or negative and then measured the number of positive posts and negative posts that people produced for a certain period of time afterward. They found that when timelines included less positive posts, people produced less positive posts. Similarly, when timelines included less negative posts, people produced less negative posts. This essentially is backing up the claim that emotional contagion can be present online too, not just in-person.
In my evaluation, I do think Kramer’s study was ethical. As on of the articles described, Facebook users have already agreed to the terms of service, so there was no reason to ask for consent. Additionally, no user data containing personal information was viewed by the researchers.
I wrote about how I do think I have consciously felt emotional contagion on the Internet before. On Facebook, sometimes I read through people’s comments about politics or sports. Generally, some of the top comments are expressing similar emotions to one another, usually of anger or disgust. After reading a handful of the comments, I sometimes find myself feeling the same emotions that the comments are expressing! This doesn’t always happen to me, but it definitely has happened to me before.
Reflecting on this assignment, I liked starting out with the basic task of looking at a dictionary definition of a term that the assignment is revolving around. It gives me a baseline understanding of the subject, and allows me to compare what I imagined the term to mean previously to what it truly is. While simple, this task was still valuable.
Additionally, I enjoyed watching the TED talk on social networks. The speaker introduced the idea of social networks by touching on the obesity epidemic, and how obese people are likely to be socially connected with other obese people. He then transitioned to emotions and also touched on the topic of emotional contagion. Listening to the talk was not only interesting and informative, but related the topic to other examples we would not have talked about otherwise.
It was also interesting to learn about the Kramer Facebook study. I do think it is ethical, but I had no idea that Facebook was allowed to do things like manipulate their feed in a way like that! It was cool to see and a great example of how emotional contagion is present online too, and not just in person.
It was valuable to end everything by writing a discussion board post touching on all of the key aspects of the assignment. This required me to go back through the materials, use critical thinking skills, and piece everything I learned back together. Ending assignments like this is a common practice in this class, and it is for good reason. It allows me to maximize my learning for the assignment, and ensure I remember that information for longer!
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