Facebook conducted secret psychology experiment on users’ emotions
By Harriet Alexander
12:00PM BST 28 Jun 2014
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages – without telling participants
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users’ news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users’ response, to see whether their friends’ attitude had an impact on their own.
“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal – Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10932534/Facebook-conducted-secret-psychology-experiment-on-users-emotions.html
Everyone thinks that Zuckerberg and Facebook are cool. Facebook is a highly invasive marketing tool. We are the product.
People that put there life out on facebook are not being too smart.
Yep, they’re pretty stupid for putting their lives on display there. Come on, triple j! Can I call you J-Trip? That’s better street cred.
Any one who has ever been on a team or worked in an office knows that negativity and positivism are positive feedback loops i.e. self reinforcing. All it takes is a couple bad apples and you have a moral problem.
Er…morale, not moral.
I guess if you don’t like Facebook you can ask for your money back.
Oh wait. I forgot. Its free.
Are you that dumb to think you get something for nothing in this world?
I have found that the biggest complainers about social media privacy are also the biggest online look-at-me types.
#4 that’s because they’re already tried their hand an attention whoring on FB and people one by one shut off their feeds. When I was on FB I had to shut people off all the time. Too much impotent political rage (anti Bush pree 2008, then anti Obama afterwards), too many requests to play the latest stupid time sucking game, too many mundane updates about where people had dinner and what they had.
It is a universe of people shouting LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT MY KIDS!!! non stop. So I deactivated my account like three years ago.