Aug 17, 2021 05:15 PM
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/inde...a-outrage/
INTRO: A new study from Yale psychology researchers is the first to provide hard evidence that social media use magnifies expressions of outrage. This is likely not surprising to anyone familiar with social media, but we cannot take our anecdotal experience for granted, and so objective evidence is welcome.
The researchers used AI to analyze 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users. The AI operationalized the assessment of how much outrage any particular tweet expressed. Of course it’s difficult to put a number on something abstract, like outrage, but as long as reasonable method was used consistently it could validly detect change over time. They found:
The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter really do change how people post. Users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in later posts. To back up these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to demonstrate that being rewarded for expressing outrage caused users to increase their expression of outrage over time.
Again, this is not surprising. Vertebrate brains evolved to respond positively to reward (there are networks in the brain dedicated to this behavior). This is a well-researched aspect of behavior – reward positively reinforces the behavior that triggered the reward (or at least seemed to). In fact this behavior is so predictable you can base entire industries on it, with carefully calibrated precision. Casinos, for example, leverage this reward positive feedback loop to maximize engagement with gamblers, even though anyone with knowledge of the odds knows that the house will always win the long run... (MORE)
INTRO: A new study from Yale psychology researchers is the first to provide hard evidence that social media use magnifies expressions of outrage. This is likely not surprising to anyone familiar with social media, but we cannot take our anecdotal experience for granted, and so objective evidence is welcome.
The researchers used AI to analyze 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users. The AI operationalized the assessment of how much outrage any particular tweet expressed. Of course it’s difficult to put a number on something abstract, like outrage, but as long as reasonable method was used consistently it could validly detect change over time. They found:
The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter really do change how people post. Users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in later posts. To back up these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to demonstrate that being rewarded for expressing outrage caused users to increase their expression of outrage over time.
Again, this is not surprising. Vertebrate brains evolved to respond positively to reward (there are networks in the brain dedicated to this behavior). This is a well-researched aspect of behavior – reward positively reinforces the behavior that triggered the reward (or at least seemed to). In fact this behavior is so predictable you can base entire industries on it, with carefully calibrated precision. Casinos, for example, leverage this reward positive feedback loop to maximize engagement with gamblers, even though anyone with knowledge of the odds knows that the house will always win the long run... (MORE)
