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 increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 7313-7318 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 114 |
Issue number | 28 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 11 2017 |
Funding
We are grateful for the extremely helpful feedback we received from Stanley Feldman, James L Gibson, Leonie Huddy, Kevin Lanning, George Marcus, Diana Mutz, Russell Neuman,and others. We are also grateful to members of the NYU Social Perception and Evaluation Lab (@vanbavellab) for their comments and suggestions. We also thank Yvan Scher, Jonathen Ronen, and Dominic Burkart for aid in data collection and programming. The data were collected by the NYU Social Media and Political Participation Laboratory (https://wp.nyu.edu/smapp/), where J.T.J. and J.A.T. are principal investigators along with Richard Bonneau and Jonathan Nagler. This research was presented by W.J.B. at the 2016 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention and by W.J.B., J.T.J., and J.V.B. at the Fall 2016 Meeting of the New York Area Political Psychology (NYAPP) group, which was sponsored by the Center for Social and Political Behavior at NYU. This research was supported by grants from the NSF (Awards 1349089, SES-1248077, and SES-1248077-001) as well as NYU's Global Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS) and Dean Thomas Carew's Research Investment Fund (RIF).
Keywords
- Emotion
- Morality
- Politics
- Social media
- Social networks
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General