Was Facebook's 'Emotional Contagion' Experiment Ethical? An academic study has come under criticism because its authors manipulated Facebook users' news feeds in order to gather data. The researchers, including one who worked for Facebook, admitted last week that they studied the parallel between an individual's emotions and the emotions portrayed on a news feed by manipulating the feeds of about 700,000 users. Over one week in January 2012, researchers eliminated "positive" posts from some users' news feeds and eliminated "negative" posts from others, to see if doing so had an effect on the users' moods. The authors of the study have drawn criticism for failing to ensure that the study was consensual, for violating users' privacy and for manipulating users' lives. [SEE: Political Cartoons] The study found that "emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people ... and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues." Privacy activists were critical of the experiment. [READ: The Politics of Tomorrow]
Emotional contagion Emotional contagion is the tendency for two individuals to emotionally converge. One view developed by Elaine Hatfield et al. is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements with those of another person.[1] When people unconsciously mimic their companions' expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions' emotions.[1] Emotions can be shared across individuals in many different ways both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon.[1] Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. Etymology[edit] Psychologist Elaine Hatfield theorizes emotional contagion as a two-step process: Step 1: We imitate people; if someone smiles at you, you smile back. Influencing factors[edit] Research[edit] Types[edit] Implicit[edit]
Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods A study (Kramer et al., 2014) was recently published that showed something astonishing — people altered their emotions and moods based upon the presence or absence of other people’s positive (and negative) moods, as expressed on Facebook status updates. The researchers called this effect an “emotional contagion,” because they purported to show that our friends’ words on our Facebook news feed directly affected our own mood. Nevermind that the researchers never actually measured anyone’s mood. And nevermind that the study has a fatal flaw. Putting aside the ridiculous language used in these kinds of studies (really, emotions spread like a “contagion”?) So how do you conduct such language analysis, especially on 689,003 status updates? The first LIWC application was developed as part of an exploratory study of language and disclosure (Francis, 1993; Pennebaker, 1993). Note those dates. Who Cares How Long the Text is to Measure? “I am not happy.” “I am not having a great day.” Reference Dr.
Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age) by Richard O. Mason Today in western societies more people are employed collecting, handling and distributing information than in any other occupation. Millions of computers inhabit the earth and many millions of miles of optical fiber, wire and air waves link people, their computers and the vast array of information handling devices together. Our society is truly an information society, our time an information age. There are many unique challenges we face in this age of information. However, the building of intellectual capital is vulnerable in many ways. Privacy: What information about one's self or one's associations must a person reveal to others, under what conditions and with what safeguards? Accuracy: Who is responsible for the authenticity, fidelity and accuracy of information? Property: Who owns information? Accessibility: What information does a person or an organization have a right or a privilege to obtain, under what conditions and with what safeguards? Privacy
Facebook denies emotion contagion study had government and military ties | Technology Facebook and Cornell researchers have denied that the controversial “emotion contagion” experiment was funded by the US Department of Defence (DoD). The social network told the Guardian that the study was entirely self-funded and that Facebook is categorically not a willing participant in the DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which funds research into the modelling of dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. “While Prof Hancock, like many researchers, has conducted work funded by the federal government during his career, at no time did Professor Hancock or his postdoctoral associate Jamie Guillory request or receive outside funding to support their work on this PNAS paper,” John Carberry, director of media relations at Cornell University where the academic work took place, told the Guardian. Determine the tipping point of social contagions
Emotional contagion sweeps Facebook, finds new study -- ScienceDaily When it hasn't been your day – your week, your month, or even your year – it might be time to turn to Facebook friends for a little positive reinforcement. According to a new study by social scientists at Cornell University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Facebook, emotions can spread among users of online social networks. The researchers reduced the amount of either positive or negative stories that appeared in the news feed of 689,003 randomly selected Facebook users, and found that the so-called “emotional contagion” effect worked both ways. “People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates,” reports Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-director of its Social Media Lab. Hancock said peoples’ emotional expressions on Facebook predicted their friends’ emotional expressions, even days later.
Ethical Data Handling and Facebook's “Emotional Contagion” Study “Dear &HouseholderName, Congratulations!You have already qualified for entry in our &CashAmount prize draw.Just return the enclosed entry slips, and in just a few days you could bedriving down &StreetName in a new &CarBrand!” Exciting stuff, isn't it? At least, the first time. After a while, though, letters like this don't even raise the pulse rate. They either go straight in the bin or, better still, the Mail Preference Service[1] prevents them from arriving in the first place. What happens if some or all of these elements are missing? In their defence, Facebook say that the study “was consistent with [the] data use policy” to which all Facebook users agree by creating an account. Prof. “Let's call the Facebook experiment what it is: a symptom of a much wider failure to think about ethics, power and consent [...]”[5] • No surprises • Legitimacy, as opposed to legality • Catering for multiple stakeholder perspectives I think you will detect echoes of all of those in the current case.
Privacy watchdog files complaint over Facebook emotion experiment | Technology Facebook could face an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its use of user data in the controversial “emotion contagion” experiment. The US privacy pressure group the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has filed a complaint with FTC demanding that the watchdog investigate Facebook’s actions. "The company purposefully messed with people's minds," states Epic in the complaint. “Facebook conducted the psychological experiment with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, who failed to follow standard ethical protocols for human subject research.” The study conducted over one week in 2012 and published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, hid "a small percentage" of emotional words from peoples' news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the statuses or "likes" that they then posted or reacted to. ‘Unfair and deceptive’ acts and practices
Why do they give us tenure? Oct.25 That’s what I asked Jeff Hancock, the Cornell University professor who collaborated with Facebook on its ‘emotional contagion’ study, which subtly manipulated the news feeds of users to see if happier inputs made for sadder outputs. I also listened closely as he spoke of being in the center of an internet storm. Conclusion: I am not convinced. # The event was put on by the Data & Society think/do tank in New York, organized by danah boyd. Summary of his presentation # Hancock told us he wanted to devote the next few years of his work to moving this discussion forward, by which he meant the ethics and transparency of big data research. The Facebook happy/sad study (my shorthand) had its origins in Hancock’s earlier work attempting to disprove a thesis in psychology: that “emotional contagion” — where one person “catches” an emotional mood from another without being aware of it — was unlikely to happen through text communication. And in this finding: # My impressions and reactions
Bringing human information behaviour into information systems research: an application of systems modelling David Johnstone, Mary Tate, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand and Marcus Bonner Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Group 76 Wardour St, London, W1F 0UU, UK Abstract In their influential paper, Dervin and Nilan compared and contrasted the traditional and alternative paradigms for human information behaviour research, highlighting the inadequacies of the former and promoting the importance of the latter. Introduction People seek out and use information constantly as part of their daily life. Dervin and Nilan (1986) suggested, in their influential paper, that people construct sense and meaning appropriate to their context from the systems available to them, and from other sources. Yet many fields rely on some ability to generalise about and predict the way human beings behave with information. This needs to be balanced with an awareness of the rich context that people apply to interpreting the information they receive. Literature review
Facebook’s Creepy Case Of Emotional Contagion Facebook manipulated the moods of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting users. Steve Brykman wants to return the favor. Pictured: As a private company, Facebook did not have to adhere to rules on the use of human subjects. (Jeff Chiu/AP) In March, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a report about a week-long psychological experiment conducted in 2012 by Facebook and Cornell University on a random sample of 689,000 Facebook users. Engineers for the social networking website manipulated the news feeds of more than three million posts to determine whether or not the presence or absence of emotional words affected a user’s feelings and subsequent posts. Here’s an excerpt from the PNAS abstract: In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. The legalese is both dense and ambiguous.