Facebook conducted social experiment

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During a week in January 2012, Facebook Inc. conducted a massive social experiment on 689,000 users; to see if they are able to literally manipulate their emotions.

Three researchers from Facebook, analysed over 3 million posts, and then tweaked Facebook’s coding, to only display negative posts to some people, and positive posts to others. The experiment’s subjects ended up posting similar status updates to what they were exposed to.

The researchers concluded that emotions are really contagious, and if people are exposed to certain emotions on social networks, chances are that they will be effected (positively or negatively) and succumb to the same feelings.

This experiment suggests that people’s emotions can be controlled at any time by social websites, and the findings were published on the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

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