Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks

Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expressio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 114; no. 28; pp. 7313 - 7318
Main Authors:	Brady, William J., Wills, Julian A., Jost, John T., Tucker, Joshua A., Van Bavel, Jay J.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States National Academy of Sciences 11-07-2017
Subjects:	Diffusion Digital media Emotions Humans Internet Language Messages Morality Morals Polarization Politics Psychology Public Policy Social interactions Social Media Social Networking Social networks Social organization Social Sciences United States politics emotion social media morality social networks
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call “moral contagion.” Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Author contributions: W.J.B., J.A.W., J.T.J., J.A.T., and J.J.V.B. designed research; W.J.B. and J.A.W. performed research; W.J.B., J.A.W., J.T.J., J.A.T., and J.J.V.B. planned analyses; W.J.B. and J.A.W. analyzed data; and W.J.B. wrote the paper and all authors contributed to revisions. Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved May 23, 2017 (received for review November 15, 2016)
ISSN:	0027-8424 1091-6490
DOI:	10.1073/pnas.1618923114