Contagious: Why Things Catch On (13 page)

It turns out that science articles frequently chronicle innovations and discoveries that evoke a particular emotion in readers. That emotion? Awe.

THE POWER OF AWE

Imagine standing on the very edge of the Grand Canyon. The bloodred gorge stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The canyon floor drops precipitously below your feet. You feel dizzy and step back from the edge. Hawks circle through rock crevasses so barren and stripped of vegetation you could as well be on the moon. You are amazed. You are humbled. You feel elevated. This is awe.

According to psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt,
awe is the sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might. It’s the experience of confronting something greater than yourself. Awe expands one’s frame of reference and drives self-transcendence. It encompasses admiration and inspiration and can be evoked by everything from great works of art or music to religious transformations, from breathtaking natural landscapes to human feats of daring and discovery.

Awe is a complex emotion and frequently involves a sense of surprise, unexpectedness, or mystery. Indeed, as Albert Einstein himself noted, “
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

More than any other emotion, awe described what many readers felt after looking at science pieces from
The New York Times.
Take “The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film.” The photo of the cough was stunning both as a visual spectacle and as an idea: that something as mundane as a cough could produce this image and yield secrets capable of solving centuries-old medical mysteries.

We decided to test whether awe drove people to share. Our research assistants went back and scored the articles based on how much awe they evoked. Articles about a new treatment for AIDS or a hockey goalie who plays even though he has brain cancer evoked lots of awe. Articles about holiday shopping bargains evoked little or no awe. We then used statistical analyses to compare these scores with whether articles were highly shared.

Our intuition was right: awe boosted sharing.

Awe-inspiring articles were 30 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. Articles previously judged to have low Social Currency and Practical Value—Grady’s cough piece or an article suggesting that gorillas may, like humans, grieve when losing loved ones—nevertheless made the Most E-Mailed list because of the awe they inspired.

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Some of the Web’s most viral videos also evoke awe.

The snickering started as soon as the plump, matronly woman walked onto the stage. She looked more like a lunch lady than a vocalist. First, she was too old to be competing on
Britain’s Got Talent.
At forty-seven, she was more than twice the age of many of the other contestants.

But, more important, she looked, well, frumpy. The other competitors were already dressed to be the next big thing. Sexy, ruggedly handsome, or hip. They wore form-fitting dresses, tailored vests, and summer scarves. But this woman looked more like an example of what not to wear. Her outfit looked like a cross between an old set of drapes and a secondhand Easter dress.

And she was nervous. When the judges started asking her questions she got stuck and stumbled on her words. “What’s the dream?” they inquired. When she replied that she wanted to be a
professional singer you could just see the thoughts going through their heads. That’s rich! You? A professional singer? The cameras zoomed in on members of the audience laughing and rolling their eyes. Even the judges smirked. They clearly wanted her to get off the stage as soon as possible. All signs pointed to her giving a terrible performance and being booted from the show, pronto.

But just as it seemed that it couldn’t get any worse, she started singing.

And time stopped.

It was breathtaking.

As the opening chords from “I Dreamed a Dream” from
Les Misérables
wafted over the speakers, Susan Boyle’s exquisite voice shone through like a beacon. So powerful, so beautiful that it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The judges were awed, the audience screamed, and everyone broke out into wild applause. Some started tearing up as they listened. The performance left people speechless.

Susan Boyle’s first appearance on
Britain’s Got Talent
is one of the most viral videos ever. In just nine short days, the clip accumulated more than 100 million views.

It’s hard to watch this video and not be awed by her strength and heart. It’s not only moving, it’s awe-inspiring. And that emotion drove people to pass it on.

DOES ANY EMOTION BOOST SHARING?

Our initial
New York Times
findings brought up other questions. What about awe makes people share? Might other emotions have the same effect?

There are reasons to believe that experiencing any sort of emotion might encourage people to share. Talking to others often makes
emotional experiences better. If we get promoted, telling others helps us celebrate. If we get fired, telling others helps us vent.

Sharing emotions also helps us connect. Say I watch a really awe-inspiring video, like Susan Boyle’s performance. If I share that video with a friend, he’s likely to feel similarly inspired. And the fact that we both feel the same way
helps deepen our social connection. It highlights our similarities and reminds us how much we have in common. Emotion sharing is thus a bit like social glue, maintaining and strengthening relationships. Even if we’re not in the same place, the fact that we both feel the same way bonds us together.

But these benefits of sharing emotion don’t just arise from awe alone. They happen for all sorts of emotions.

If you send a coworker a joke that cracks both of you up, it underscores your connection. If you send your cousin an op-ed piece that makes you both angry, it strengthens the fact that you share the same views.

So would
any
type of emotional content be more likely to be shared?

To answer this, we picked another emotion, sadness, and dove back into the data. We asked our research assistants to score each article based on how much sadness it evoked. Articles about things like someone paying tribute to his deceased grandmother were scored as evoking a good deal of sadness, while articles about things like a winning golfer were scored as low sadness. If any emotion boosted sharing, then sadness—like awe—should also increase sharing.

But it didn’t. In fact, sadness had the opposite effect. Sadder articles were actually 16 percent
less
likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. Something about sadness was making people less likely to share. What?

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The most obvious difference between different emotions is their pleasantness or positivity. Awe is relatively pleasant, while sadness is unpleasant. Might positive emotions increase sharing, but negative emotions decrease it?

People have long speculated about how positive and negative emotions influence what people talk about and share. Conventional wisdom suggests that
negative content should be more viral. Consider the old news adage “If it bleeds, it leads.” This phrase is based on the notion that bad news generates more attention and interest than good news. That’s why the nightly news always starts with something like: “The hidden health hazard that’s lurking in your basement. Find out more, next, on the six o’clock news.” Editors and producers believe that negative stories will help draw, and keep, viewers’ attention.

That said, you could also make a case for the opposite: that people prefer sharing good news. After all, don’t most of us want to make others feel happy or positive rather than anxious or sad? Similarly, as we discussed in the chapter on Social Currency, whether people share something often depends on how it makes them look to others. Positive things may be shared more because they reflect positively on the person doing the sharing. After all, no one wants to be Debbie Downer, always sharing things that are sad and gloomy.

So which is it? Is positive information more likely to be shared than negative, or vice versa?

We went back to our database and measured the positivity of each article. This time we used a textual analysis program developed by
psychologist Jamie Pennebaker. The program quantifies
the amount of positivity and negativity in a passage of text by
counting the number of times hundreds of different emotional words appear. The sentence “I loved the card; that was so nice of her,” for example, is relatively positive because it contains positive words like “love” and “nice.” The sentence “That was so nasty of her; it really hurt my feelings,” on the other hand, is relatively negative because of negative words like “hurt” and “nasty.” We scored each article based on its positivity or negativity and then examined how that related to whether it made the Most E-Mailed list.

The answer was definitive: positive articles were more likely to be highly shared than negative ones. Stories about things like
newcomers falling in love with New York City were, on average, 13 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list than pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular zookeeper.

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Finally we were feeling confident that we understood how emotion shapes transmission. It seemed like people share positive things and avoid sharing negative ones.

But just to be sure that we were correct that negative emotions decrease sharing, we gave our research assistants one final task. We asked them to score each article on two other major negative emotions: anger and anxiety.

Articles about things like Wall Street fat cats getting hefty bonuses during the economic downturn induced lots of anger, while articles about topics like summer T-shirts evoked no anger at all. Articles about things like the stock market tanking made people pretty anxious, while articles about things like Emmy Award nominees evoked no anxiety. If it were true that people share positive content and avoid sharing negative content, then anger and anxiety should, like sadness, reduce sharing.

But this wasn’t the case. In fact, it was the opposite.
Articles
that evoked anger or anxiety were
more
likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.

Now we were really confused. Clearly, something more complicated than whether an article was positive or negative determined how widely things were shared. But what?

KINDLING THE FIRE: THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL

The idea that emotions can be categorized as positive or pleasant and negative or unpleasant has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Even a child can tell you that happiness or excitement feels good and anxiety or sadness feels bad.

More recently, however, psychologists have argued that emotions can also be classified based on a second dimension. That of activation, or physiological arousal.

What is physiological arousal? Think about the last time you gave a speech in front of a large audience. Or when your team was on the verge of winning a huge game. Your pulse raced, your palms sweated, and you could feel your heart pounding in your chest. You may have had similar feelings the last time you saw a scary movie or went camping and heard a weird noise outside your tent. Though your head kept saying you weren’t really in danger, your body was convinced otherwise. Every sense was heightened. Your muscles were tensed and you were alert to every sound, smell, and movement.
This is arousal.

Arousal is a state of activation and readiness for action. The heart beats faster and blood pressure rises. Evolutionarily, it comes from our ancestors’ reptilian brains. Physiological arousal motivates a fight-or-flight response that helps organisms catch food or flee from predators.

We no longer have to chase our dinner or worry about being eaten, but the activation arousal provides still facilitates a host of everyday actions. When aroused we do things. We wring our hands and pace back and forth. We pump our fists in the air and run around the living room. Arousal kindles the fire.

Some emotions, like anger and anxiety, are high-arousal. When we’re angry we yell at customer service representatives. When we’re anxious we check and recheck things. Positive emotions also generate arousal. Take excitement. When we feel excited we want to do something rather than sit still. The same is true for awe. When inspired by awe we can’t help wanting to tell people what happened.

Other emotions, however, have the opposite effect: they stifle action.

Take sadness. Whether dealing with a tough breakup or the death of a beloved pet, sad people tend to power down. They put on some cozy clothes, curl up on the couch, and eat a bowl of ice cream. Contentment also deactivates. When people are content, they relax. Their heart rates slow, and their blood pressure decreases. They’re happy, but they don’t particularly feel like
doing
anything. Think of how you feel after a long hot shower or a relaxing massage. You’re more likely to relax and sit still than leap into another activity.

Once we realized the important role that emotional arousal might play, we returned to our data. Just to recap, so far we had found that awe increased sharing and that sadness decreased it. But rather than finding a simple matter of positive emotions increasing sharing and negative emotions decreasing it, we found that some negative emotions, like anger or anxiety, actually increased sharing. Would physiological arousal be the key to the puzzle?