In this era of "incite outrage-at-the-moment-to-get-that-click" clickbait news and postings pushed to us by mainstream media and social networks, is it a wonder that society is in the current state that its in..?
This article at NPR states that even if you're not aware of it, it's likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today. This can happen during our most basic exchanges, say on your commute to work. "If someone smiles at you, you smile back at them," says sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Yale University. "That's a very fleeting contagion of emotion from one person to another."
But it doesn't stop there. Emotions can spread through social networks almost like the flu or a cold. And, the extent to which emotions can cascade is eye-opening.
For instance, Christakis' research has shown that if you start to become happier with your life, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy too. And your partner is more likely to feel better as well. The happiness can even spread to people to whom you're indirectly connected.
To document this, Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town, over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. "We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network," Christakis says.
It's not just happiness that spreads, unhappiness and anger can be contagious, too. Should negative-clickbait be banned as a social threat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @04:25AM
If I didn't have to deal with Mexicans on a regular basis, then reading Breitbart wouldn't piss me off.
You might feel differently after you retire down here. Beer and tequila are still cheaper, though gasoline, milk, and good toilet paper aren't, the weather is nice all year.
I'm a news junkie too. I spend a half hour on the shitter every morning perusing through headlines on Microsoft News on the tablet, but I sure don't let it get to me. It's all bullshit stories written by a bunch of coke heads, even on Breitbert, bart, whatever. Why would you believe any of it? You can't get a straight news story anymore, except possibly in the obituaries. The true value of the newspaper is the funnies and the classifieds.