From the emotional to the awe-inspiring, the popularity of news stories appears to follow a surprising trend.
Wharton Assistant Professor of Marketing Jonah Berger and Wharton Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management Katherine Milkman conducted an independent study from Aug. 30, 2008 to Feb. 15, 2009 on the popularity of The New York Times articles.
Study results revealed that positive articles were more shared than negative ones, and that awe-inspiring and “useful” pieces were also highly popular.
The study used the Times’ “most e-mailed” list as the primary measure of popularity.
“We talk to our friends, our relatives, our neighbors all the time,” Berger said, explaining that people are constantly sharing “YouTube videos, recipes [and] New York Times articles.”
With this idea in mind, the study focused on the reasons people share particular stories over others.
According to Milkman, the project’s “germination” began two years ago.
“We were interested in studying real data, real people not in a controlled environment where they feel like they’re being observed,” Milkman said.
The project consisted of analyzing data compiled every 15 minutes for a six-month period — a collection that included over 7,500 articles.
Articles’ authors, full content, one-sentence summaries, dates published and locations in both the print version and the website were recorded by means of a web crawler, which “visits a website and pulls information from it in an automated way,” Milkman said.
With this data, Berger and Milkman created an equation used to “predict the likelihood of making the most e-mailed list.”
Wharton freshman Steve Levick believed the list to be “generally random,” noting that personally, “it doesn’t occur to me whether the article is positive or negative.”
In order to assess the positivity or negativity of an article, Berger and Milkman counted the number of positive and negative words within articles, scored them and then established a correlation between variables and outcome.
Similarly, research assistants took article titles and descriptions and categorized them on a one-to-five scale to determine their level of awe.
“A little … dose of awe goes a long way,” Berger said, adding that science-related stories were particularly popular in this criteria.
Currently, the researchers are studying other emotions such as anger, sadness and anxiety and their effects on story sharing.
So far, “more anxiety-inducing things are more likely to be shared,” while anger-related pieces are less likely, Berger said.
While the study has revealed clear links between certain aspects of stories and article-sharing, the researchers are “nowhere close to finished,” Berger said. He added that they expect to conclude analyses over the next few months.
