Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.

ABSTRACT: Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call "moral contagion." Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increas

SUBMITTER: Brady WJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5514704 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature