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600,000 Facebook users unknowingly take part in psychological experiment

on Jun 29, 2014 | 0 comments

By Jennifer Faull

Facebook conducted an experiment into how content can affect emotions by manipulating the feeds of over 600,000 unsuspecting users.

The ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks’ paper was recently published and explained that Facebook changed the tone of feeds by skewing the number of positive and negative terms seen.

Facebook then monitored the effect it had on users’ emotions.

“The results show emotional contagion,” wrote the team of Facebook scientists in the paper.

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These Read full story ›

Source: The Drum