Facebook Experiment Secretly Manipulated Emotions
Do you ever have those days scrolling through your Facebook feed when you think, “Goodness, EVERYONE is so upset today!” Turns out? In January of 2012, Facebook teamed up with researchers from the University of California and Cornell to see if by manipulating the feed of over 700,000 people, they could influence what those same people post. Some folks were shown only negative or sad updates, while other only saw happier news. Or, as the study puts it:
“We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.”
Was what Facebook did illegal? And it feels downright creepy. According to this article in Forbes, Facebook claims the research was done for internal use only – which of course is completely untrue considering it was an academic study that may have had federal funding. It makes me wonder what other kind of psychological manipulation users are subjected to that they never learn about because it isn’t published in an academic journal.“
