Facebook has carried out a massive psychology experiment in secret without informing participants.
More than 600,000 Facebook users were involved in the research into how users respond to positive and negative messages.
Users each have news feeds which delivers messages from friends. These were altered to highlight either negative posts or positive ones.
Each user’s response was monitored to see if the tone of the message received had an impact on the recipient’s attitude.
The research results indicate that “emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions”. When negative expressions predominated, recipients produced negative posts and vice-versa.
Facebook called this “experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks”.
The result, while perhaps predictable, will be of interest to social scientists as well as advertisers.
All Facebook users are obliged to agree to the social media’s terms and conditions which include "internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement."
The company says a machine was used to select positive and negative posts so that no human researchers were viewing personal information.
