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This study examines the organizational dynamics of social media crowds, in particular, the influence of a crowd’s emotional expression on its solidarity. To identify the relationship between emotions expressed and solidarity, marked by sustained participation in the crowd, the study uses tweets from a unique population of crowds—those tweeting about ongoing National Football League games. Observing this population permits the use of game results as quasi-random treatments on crowds, helping to reduce confounding factors. Results indicate that participation in these crowds is self-sustaining in the medium term (1 week) and can be stimulated or suppressed by emotional expression in a short term (1 hour), depending on the discrete emotion expressed. In particular, anger encourages participation while sadness discourages it. Positive emotions and anxiety have a more nuanced relationship with participation.
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The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect
How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can focus their attention on only some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions and that this generates a crowd-emotion-amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response as more extreme than it actually is. Study 1 ( N = 50) documented the crowd-emotion-amplification effect. Study 2 ( N = 50) replicated the effect even when we increased exposure time. Study 3 ( N = 50) used eye tracking to show that attentional bias to emotional faces drives amplification. These findings have important implications for many domains in which individuals must make snap judgments regarding a crowd’s emotionality, from public speaking to controlling crowds.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1653188
- PAR ID:
- 10546920
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 437-450
- Size(s):
- p. 437-450
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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