Affective responses to uncertain real-world outcomes: Sentiment change on Twitter.

ABSTRACT: We use data from Twitter.com to study the interplay between affect and expectations about uncertain outcomes. In two studies, we obtained tweets about candidates in the 2014 US Senate elections and tweets about National Football League (NFL) teams in the 2014/2015 NFL season. We chose these events because a) their outcomes are highly uncertain and b) they attract a lot of attention and feature heavily in the communication on social media. We also obtained a priori expectations for the events from political forecasting and sport betting websites. Using this quasi-experimental design, we found that unexpected events are associated with more intense affect than expected events. Moreover, the effect of expectations is larger for outcomes that fall below expectations than outcomes that exceed e

SUBMITTER: Bhatia S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6392292 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature