Back in the day, long before anyone dreamed the internet would exist, people still loved a good battle of wits. They challenged each other in public debates in front of half the town or poured all their rage into pages and pages of carefully written letters.
Push things too far, and an argument could even end in an actual duel. The stakes could get pretty high when someone really wanted the last word.
Now, a lot of those verbal showdowns happen on social media. Someone posts something, another person fires back in the comments, and suddenly thousands of strangers are watching it play out.
The only difference is that the town square has been replaced by a screen, and the audience can now be millions strong. Getting ratioed is the internet’s version of the crowd deciding who won.
We may have traded cheering crowds and flying tomatoes for likes and dislikes, but watching someone completely win an argument is still very entertaining, even online. People love anything that gets them worked up in one way or another.
One study, for example, looked at why some memes and videos go viral and found that people were more likely to share them when they felt strongly about what they saw. It didn’t matter whether those feelings were positive or negative.
Something could make people incredibly happy, seriously angry, or completely disgusted and still have the same effect. The researchers called this “emotional contagion.”
Basically, when we see other people reacting a certain way, we’re more likely to follow their lead and do the same.
Another study, though, didn’t get quite the same results. Researchers at Beihang University in China looked at how different emotions spread between people on social media and found that one stood out from the rest: anger.
Joy also spread pretty well, while sadness and disgust were less likely to catch on. Anger, though, travelled further than all of them.
Ultimately, though, the more attention something gets, the easier it is for that attention to keep growing. This is something called social proof.
Mad Social Agency explains that when we see a post with thousands of likes, we’re more likely to stop and see what everyone else found so interesting. And once more people start looking, the numbers can keep climbing from there.
