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What Makes Online Content Viral?

Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? this article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. the results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. these results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured). experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation induced. taken together, these findings shed light on why people share content and how to design more effective viral marketing campaigns. 

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Telling your science story

Data Nuggets provide you as a scientist with an avenue to share your work and findings with a broad audience of students, teachers, and fellow scientists. Sharing research findings with the non-science public is an important part of the science process, yet is often one of the most challenging to achieve. With broader impacts a factor in most grants, finding effective methods of communication and transmission is key. Data Nuggets are an easy way to increase your broader impacts, as we are constantly working to share these resources with K-12 audiences to improve the understanding of science in society.

When creating a Data Nugget, you must dig deep to uncover the core messages of your research and think back to the big question that got you passionate about the research in the first place. Also, by creating a Data Nugget and practicing communicating research to a 6th grader, you can rest assured that at your next conference you’ll be better able to discuss your work with collaborators and those outside your field!

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Profile picture of Elizabeth H Schultheis

Elizabeth H Schultheis