When we click “share”

An article by Natalie Kitroeff that was published by The New York Times this week summarizes research from both academia and industry about the factors that make it more likely that a video or news story will go “viral” (or be widely shared and forwarded). Some of the things that make a difference: emotion and physiological arousal.  A study by Berger and Milkman (2012) that was published in the Journal of Marketing Research (UM-St. Louis students can read the whole thing through the library’s article database) of the most-forwarded stories from The New York Times found that stories that evoked either positive arousal (awe) or negative arousal (anger) were more likely to be forwarded, controlling for other factors.