Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content

Why are certain pieces of online content more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique dataset of all the New York Times articles published over a three month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. More positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone, and is driven in part by arousal. Content that evokes either positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions characterized by high arousal is more viral. Content that evokes low arousal emotion (sadness) is less viral. These results hold controlling 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 arousal on transmission and generalize the findings to positive emotions. Together, these findings shed light on why people share content, provide insight into designing effective viral marketing campaigns, and underscore the importance of individual-level psychological processes in shaping collective outcomes.