Journalists Outraged Over Facebook Emotional Manipulation Study, Manipulate Readers into Being Angry at Facebook · 3:29am Jun 30th, 2014
For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, Facebook recently published a study they did on their users’ emotional states in 2012. They randomly generated two groups of about 700,000 users, then used an automated system to manipulate their news feeds. For one group, they culled news posts containing more positive language and smiling, happy faces; for another, they culled posts containing more negative language and unhappy faces. They then measured the users’ own news posts over the course of a week.
The result? The group whose newsfeeds were made artificially positive ended up making more positive posts, with more positive words and more happy faces, while the group whose newsfeeds were made artificially negative made more negative posts, with more negative words and more frowny faces, thus proving that changing someone’s surroundings, even online, changes their attitudes and behavior, or at the very least what they post to their Facebook page.
Naturally, this resulted in an incredible amount of outrage from the Internet. How dare Facebook manipulate our emotional states without our knowledge and consent!
Nevermind the fact that everyone expressing outrage and decrying the study was trying to manipulate the emotions of their readers into feeling outraged over Facebook’s action. Clearly, it is okay if THEY’RE doing it.
I found opinion journalists’ complaints about this particularly funny, given the overall nature of their work, but this is really true of all news organizations, and indeed pretty much all writing; when we write something, we want to influence our reader in some way. Sometimes we want to teach them something or inform them; sometimes we want them to feel some emotion; and sometimes, we want to take some action, be that signing a dumb web petition or just reading another article on their site.
News sites put news articles alongside other articles, or below them, so that when you’re done reading, you have somewhere else to click and stay on the same site. Facebook tries to encourage users to stay on their site via various loops and other things they can do. Google tries to do everything, and give users an integrated, high quality experience that keeps them coming back for more and to do more business with them.
But it goes beyond that. You’ve got the whole Culture of Fear thing which goes on with the news media, where they exaggerate the importance of very minor things, highlighting danger, trouble, or controversy, or at times even creating controversy where none exists, simply for the sake of putting butts in the seat. And this study seems to imply, rather unsurprisingly, that this sort of thing is bad for people’s psychology.
I would love to pretend that the real reason that the journalists are so upset by this is because they are upset that someone is pointing out that the Culture of Fear is real; that they, the journalistic community, are manipulating the emotions of their readership, and thus they must scream and yell and point fingers at Facebook for doing a study on it.
But the sad truth is that they’re utterly unaware of their hypocrisy. Facebook, at least, did what they did for noble reasons – for science! Journalists are doing it to promote their own personal agendas, or to put butts in the seats, and I don’t know which is worse.
Is it wrong to manipulate others? It is a natural part of human communication, after all; a great deal of what we do is meant to provoke some sort of response in others. Speaking with confidence makes others feel more confident in us and makes us seem more dominant. We can use language or present facts in a way to provoke outrage or pity; you could present this study in a much more positive light by stating that it is proof that what we choose to surround ourselves with has a major influence on our behavior, so if we want to be more positive, we should try to surround ourselves with positive things, and try to avoid sites which are full of negativity, despair, and outrage.
As a writer, I think it is important to recognize that we do manipulate our readers to some extent with our stories; we make them happy or sad, make them laugh or cry, and at the very least write the introductions of our stories in such a way that they hook the reader and make them want to forge onwards. Indeed, “manipulating” people into clicking on your story with a good summary, a good cover, and a good title are all important skills – but we don’t even contextualize it as such, we simply see it as generating interest and promoting ourselves and our work. But all promotion involves making someone else behave differently than they would have otherwise.
As a person, however, I think it is also important to know about these techniques. Always remember that the person who ultimately has control over your actions is you, and you alone. It is harder to manipulate someone who keeps in mind that their reactions are under their control, and harder still to manipulate someone who recognizes the manipulation. But you have to genuinely understand that everything can and does influence you – never forget that this is as true of your allies as it is of your enemies. Someone on your side may be trying to manipulate you for what they perceive to be your own good, as these journalists are by trying to stir up outrage against Facebook, or as various political pundits do when they decry someone in the other party – but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are indeed acting in your best interests.
EDIT: Randall agrees with me, apparently. Good thing he had someone like me to set him on the right path.
This is why metacognition is so important. The more you think about how you think and the more you understand the usual avenues taken by your thoughts, the better you can recognize manipulation, whether you're manipulating or being manipulated.
As for the Facebook study, consent to this sort of thing was probably buried somewhere in the terms of service agreement. I suppose the rest of Facebook served as a control group. In any case, it's nice to see something constructive come out of the site.
2244878
The Terms of Service note that they may engage in research on you at their own discretion. So, yes.
2244878 I worked in sales for a few years, manipulating people for a living. I was pretty good at it.
Being a good salesperson, however, does not make you harder to sell too. It might make you easier to sell to (or the causality could be reversed) but I can assure you: salespeople are great customers.
I think it's related to something like this: to persuade, you have to express emotion, and to express you have to be open. People who are emotionally closed and controlled can't project emotions well and therefore make terrible salespeople. Open people can project, but are more subject to projection.
I'm all for metacognition, but knowing how to manipulate does not protect you from manipulation. It doers, however, allow you to manipulate yourself.
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Learning how to project emotions is a learned skill; you don't have to be an emotionally open person to do it, and indeed, it is helpful to be able to separate yourself from such; look at the various serial killers who lured people to their doom. Look at con artists.
Coming off as genuine is very helpful for a salesperson, but if you study human behavior, there's nothing that requires you to be an open person at all. It is true that a lot of salespeople are more outgoing people, but I've met some folks who are not at all outgoing in their private lives and yet "turn on" when they're selling stuff. A lot of sales folks are very tough to pull one over on or sell stuff to; both of my parents worked in sales at various points, and they're very good at telling people no.
Maybe it is just because I deal with people who sell big stuff - titanium, corporate electronics, chemical supplies, raw materials in bulk - but the kind of salespeople who do that stuff seem pretty good at what they do and yet don't seem on the whole to be vulnerable in having it turned back on them.
Indeed, it seems to me like selling to the introverts is actually easier; they're not as used to people just acting outright friendly and congenial towards them.
2246820 In my experience, selling to introverts is not much different than selling to extroverts, except that with introverts you don't have to worry about them derailing the conversation.
Of course I sold appliances, not industrial materials.
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I don't know that there's any evidence of this, though, and it seems to fly in the face of expertise in literally every other field, where being good at something makes you better at judging when other people are doing that same thing well.
2249371 That's a false equivalency: being good at sales means you know when someone else is good at sales, even when they're directing it at you.
But knowing someone is good at, say, engineering, doesn't mean you can now stop them from doing good engineering. That's a separate skill, assuming it's a thing you want to do.
(A better analogy might be sports: good offense and good defense are often very different skill sets.)
2250996
A lot of sales is about being able to judge the value of a product to a customer, figuring out what the customer wants, and getting them to realize that they want said thing. It seems to me like that is quite directly applicable to yourself, as you can use it on yourself to improve self awareness. It also is about building interpersonal relationships with your customers, which again seems like it is the sort of thing which is applicable from both sides.
When you're talking about engineering, I wouldn't say that you can "stop" someone from doing successful engineering at all because there's no "defense" there - you're designing something, there is no opposition in the usual sense. Your design is a design.
If you're talking about, say, controlled demolition, that is a different skillset, but if you're talking about sussing out weaknesses in someone else's designs, that's the same skillset necessary to prevent said weaknesses from existing in the first place. Same goes for costs and other things. In engineering, a lot of it is about problem solving, and a lot of that involves knowing how other people have solved problems in the past, and know where to look to start out with. If you're an experienced bridge designer, you can look at a bridge design and figure out how the load is being distributed and look for mistakes or bad assumptions.
The Army Corps of Engineers totally looking for weaknesses in enemy fortifications, and I think that skill is closely related to building fortifications of your own, because you understand how they are build, their strengths and weaknesses, and can go from there to figure out if the opposition has done it right or if they have left themselves open.
2251842 Yeah, engineering was a bad example.
But you said:
(emphasis mine) In my experience, that does not reflect observed reality. And when theory does not reflect reality, it's not reality that's wrong.
You can persuade yourself to do things, but being able to persuade does not, by itself, change your resistance to persuasion. (And again, I have years of experience at this: if there's a correlation, it's negative.)