Testing, Evaluation and Science

The next session of the Critical Media Lab Colloquium will take place, Wednesday the 22nd of October at the Critical Media Lab (D 3.05) from 4:15 to 5:45 PM.

For the third session of our first Critical Media Lab colloquium series — What Constitutes Critique? — we host a session with Andreas Simon. The text for the upcoming colloquium is a short and highly controversial research paper with the title “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” by Kramer et al. that was published this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper explores the effect of emotional contagion (tracking other people’s emotion) in an online social network: “In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. […] results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.“

Please have a look at the research paper, if you can:
Adam Kramer, Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock (2014), “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”

There you will also find two texts as optional background material: A widely cited 2008 research paper on emotional contagion and a recent magazine article discussing the Facebook study.