Estimating the effect size of moral contagion in online networks: A pre-registered replication and meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: Over 5 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become increasingly entangled with online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of online information diffusion. This is particularly true for the political domain, as political elites, disinformation profiteers, and social activists all use social media to gain influence by spreading information. Recent work found that emotional expressions related to morality (moral-emotion expression) are associated with increased diffusion of political messages-a phenomenon we called "moral contagion." Here, we perform a large, pre-registered direct replication (N = 849,266) of Brady et al. using the dictionary methods from the original paper, as well as new large-language models. We also conduct a me

SUBMITTER: Brady WJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12578369 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature