Share Podcast
The Science of Sharing (and Oversharing)
Jonah Berger, Wharton School professor and author of “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”
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An interview with Jonah Berger, Wharton School professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. I am talking today with Wharton professor Jonah Berger, author of the book Contagious– How Things Catch On. Jonah, thanks so much for talking with us today.
JONAH BERGER: Thanks for having me.
SARAH GREEN: So Jonah, in your research, you examine some of the reasons people share content on the internet, share products by word of mouth. And one of the reasons you give has to do with emotion, and that’s not terribly surprising in and of itself. But what did surprise me was how different emotions are not exactly created equal when it comes to sharing things. Can you just tell us a little bit about how different emotions cause us to react differently when we’re spreading the news about a new product or a new piece of content?
JONAH BERGER: You might think that all emotions are created equal, that all give us an equal likelihood of sharing. Or you might think that positive emotions make us share, but negative emotions don’t. Share positive things ’cause that makes us look good and smart. We avoid sharing negative things because we don’t want to be a Debbie Downer or put others in a bad mood.
But when we looked deeper, we found that it was more complicated than that. So we, in this case, looked at thousands of online pieces of content and measured whether or not those contents were highly shared, whether they made things like the most emailed list, and also measured the emotions that those pieces of content evoked. And what we found was interesting.
First we found that positive things, on average, are shared more than negative ones, but that it is more complicated than that. Some negative emotions, like anger or anxiety, actually increase sharing. While other negative emotions, like sadness for example, decrease sharing.
And so what we realized is emotions actually differ on another very important dimension, which is how activating or how aroused they make us feel. High arousal emotions, like anger and anxiety, drive us to action. And when we’re angry, we want to yell at someone or throw something or stamp our feet, jump up and down. The same sort of things we do when we’re excited, but in a positive way.
Whereas when we’re sad, we want to curl up in a ball and do nothing. Watch our favorite movie, eat a bowl of ice cream.
And what we found in our research is these high arousal emotions, whether they’re positive or negative, because they activate us, they drive us to pass [INAUDIBLE]. So in terms of getting content to be shared, we can’t just use emotion. We have to use high arousal emotion.
SARAH GREEN: So one of the interesting things about that and about the role there of the negative emotions was that you recently published a piece in HBR in which you talked about how actually negative or angry product reviews actually ended up boosting the bottom line in some cases and increasing sales of the products that were negatively reviewed. So what’s going on there?
I can understand that if you’re angry, it might drive you to want to share how much you hate the product. But then why would that actually increase sales of that product?
JONAH BERGER: We’ve all seen examples of negative publicity or negative word of mouth. So take the movie Borat, for example, that came out now almost a decade ago. That movie poked relentless fun at the country of Kazakhstan. How backward it was, how funny it was, and all those things that you would think would make someone not want to go there. Yet after that movie, visits to Kazakhstan jumped up by about 300%.
SARAH GREEN: [LAUGHS].
JONAH BERGER: And so when is negative actually positive? Well, what our research found is that even negative word of mouth, even negative publicity, can increase sales if it increases awareness or accessibility. For small businesses or products that most people don’t know much about, even a negative can be a good thing because it lets other people know that the product exists.
I’m not suggesting go out there and get negative word of mouth. But what I am saying is negative isn’t always as bad as we think it is. Sometimes it can provide information or just remind people that something exists when they wouldn’t have realized about it previously.
So if you’re getting lots of negative word of mouth, the first thing to do is obvious. Don’t worry about the word of mouth, worry about what’s negative. Try to solve the problem.
If people are complaining about your service, fix your service. If people are complaining about the way the customer reps are dealing with them, fix that. If people are complaining about the technology, well, solve that problem. But beyond that, once you’ve done that, well, realize that even a little bit of negative doesn’t necessarily hurt the bottom line.
SARAH GREEN: And I want to just dive off of that a little bit and talk about another variation there, which is controversy. You’ve got a forthcoming paper that you’ve been working on with Zoey Chen, and you’re talking about the role of controversy in stimulating conversation.
And in that paper, you and Chen write that contrary to popular belief, controversial things are not necessarily more likely to be discussed. Which as someone in the publishing industry, to me seems to defeat the entire point of controversy. So can you just tell us, what is actually going on there?
JONAH BERGER: There’s a lay belief out there that controversy causes conversation. That the more controversial a news article is, the more controversial that a comment is, the more buzz it will receive. Recently, Angelina Jolie’s been in the press a lot for a somewhat controversial decision she made to get a double mastectomy that’s gotten a lot of attention in the popular press.
But when we actually looked at the data, what we found was a little bit different than popular wisdom. Some controversy can be good, a middle level of controversy. But actually a high level of controversy decreases conversation.
Controversy does two things simultaneously. It makes what you’re talking about more interesting. But it also makes it more uncomfortable.
We think about those conversations about abortion, for example, or really controversial issues and society, whether religion should be in schools, or talking about gun control with someone– if you’re an anti-gun advocate– who’s a big gun advocate, those things are really controversial. They’re sort of uncomfortable topics to talk about. And so these combinations of things drives what people share.
Yes, some controversy can be good. But how good it is depends on who you’re talking to and the situation. If you’re talking to a friend of yours, well, a little more controversy’s OK because you know them well. You’re not worried about what they think about you.
But talking with strangers, even a middle level controversy can hurt, because you don’t want to say the wrong thing ’cause you don’t know them very well. And so what we found is that controversy has a more nuanced impact on word of mouth than we might have realized.
SARAH GREEN: So Jonah, mostly so far today we’ve been talking about the different emotional reasons that people might share or decide not to share pieces of content or information about products. But you in the book, go into a number of other reasons besides emotions that people do want to share things. So can we just take a step back from the emotional piece of it and talk about some of those other reasons?
JONAH BERGER: Yeah. I think that’s a good question. And what I would say is if you look at our book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, we’ve actually boiled it down to six key principles that drive people to share. It’s not luck and it’s not random. Yes, things requires some application, but there’s actually a science behind it.
When we looked at thousands of brands, and we’ve looked at tens of thousands of online articles, again and again we saw the same drivers of sharing. Sure, emotion is one of them. But it’s not the only driver. Another thing we found was what we call social currency.
People love to talk about things and share things that make them look good, smart, and in the know. A couple months ago, LinkedIn for example, sent an email out to a number of their members saying, hey, you have one of the top 5% or top 10% of profiles in LinkedIn. Well, people felt pretty good they got that email. But thousands of them also shared it with others because it made them look good. They wanted to get that credit, that status that feeling special gives you.
But notice that along the way, they had to mention the name LinkedIn that they got that status from. And so social currency is another key idea that drives people to share.
We also talk about triggers, or cues in the environment. When something is top of mind, it’s [INAUDIBLE]. So these things may seem a little bit nuanced, but we’ve really boiled them down into six key principles that are easy for any manager to apply to their own product or idea.
SARAH GREEN: Your book mostly focuses on all the ways to get people to share things, and you are a marketing professor, so I can see the motivation there. But you also have couple of interesting points where you talk about the dark side of sharing. And I wanted just to touch on those a little bit.
So I think one of those for us as individuals is over sharing. I think probably most of us at this point have run into this on Facebook or some other form of social media, where we suddenly over share information that we didn’t really mean to share. Why do we do that?
JONAH BERGER: [LAUGHS]. So one interesting reason why we do that actually relates a little bit to that point we discussed about emotion. We did a very simple study. We brought people into the laboratory and we either had them sit still for 60 seconds or we had them run in place for 60 seconds. So jog in place in the lab for just a minute.
And then we have them sit down and we give them an unrelated piece of content and we ask them whether they wanted to email that content to someone that they know. And what we found is that merely running in place actually more than doubled the likelihood of sharing that content with others. And the reason is that arousal, that activation.
When we’ve just exercised, when we’re on a plane ride that’s a little bit rocky, when we walk out of a movie that’s really scary, these emotions that we feel activate us, or the exercise that we do activate us. It gets the blood pumping, it gets our heart going, it gets our mind and our senses on alert. And this activation drives us to share things, even if we don’t mean to share them. It leads to a lot of over sharing.
So merely exercising can lead us to pass things on that we might not have thought we should pass on in the first place. So the next time you get off the treadmill or you find yourself deplaning after a harrowing flight, be careful about what you’re talking about, ’cause you may share more things than you realize.
SARAH GREEN: Mm. There’s another sort of interesting parallel there where you talk in the book about why people share misinformation. And that’s something that really seems to resonate with me, especially as we see now so many people taking to Twitter, for instance, in cases of local emergency or a natural disaster. And so many people are passing on bad information.
And of course, that goes all the way back to Snopes and all kind. And there’s a very old saying that a lie can race around the world while the truth is still lacing up its sneakers.
But you had a really interesting explanation for that in the book where you talked about why people do pass on information that’s bad. Can you just explain a little bit about why we might do that? Why we might share content that actually turns out to be false?
JONAH BERGER: The reasons are actually the same as we’ve been talking about so far. Again, these six key steps.
So we pass on content that makes us look good, whether it ends up being true at the end of the day or not. We pass on content that’s triggered by the environment. If we’re thinking about a particular idea, we try to have a story about that idea. Even if it’s a rumor and it might not actually be true.
Every time there’s a natural disaster, people often trot out information rumors because they’re thinking so much about that disaster. [? Emotive. ?]
If something arouses us, even if it’s negative, false information, something that’s not true about a product, that maybe we’re worried it’s detrimental, we pass that on, even though it’s not actually correct. If it’s useful, if we think it’s useful.
Lots of vaccine information, much as folks that are anti-vaccine have spread a lot of information that’s not actually correct. Vaccines don’t cause some of these diseases that people think they do. But they’re worried about it, so they pass on that information that they think is useful, but actually isn’t.
And really good stories. Again, stories that seem good, we’re going to share them whether or not the information contained in them is true.
People aren’t trying to pass on misinformation. They’re not trying to make others worse off. They’re trying to help others. But even they don’t realize that it’s false. They may pass it on because these motivators, these six key steps of sharing cause them to pass it on.
SARAH GREEN: Well, that’s a little creepy. It almost feels like we’re not really in control of what we’re sharing.
JONAH BERGER: I think we don’t realize that we’re not in control of many of the behaviors in our lives. So one study I talk about in the book, if they play French music at the grocery store, consumers are much more likely to buy French wine.
SARAH GREEN: [LAUGHS].
JONAH BERGER: They play German music at the grocery store, people are much more likely to buy German wine. Now you would say, well hold on. Why should the mere music that they play in the grocery store shift what kind of wine that I purchase? Shouldn’t I already know my preferences?
Yeah, you do have some preferences. But these subtle cues in the environment, these triggers that we’ve talked about today, can have an important and non-conscious impact on our behavior.
We actually looked at voting as well. We were interesting in looking at where people vote, whether they voted say at church versus a school, might actually change how they vote by acting as a trigger in the environment.
And we did. We actually found that voting in schools makes people significantly more likely to support a school funding initiative. Even though it’s just merely casting their ballot at a different type of location.
The same thing might happen with voting in a church. It might change how you vote on gay marriage or stem cell initiatives. It makes you think more about the church’s doctrine and how the church would want you to behave. And so sharing, just like many consumer behaviors, is often subtly influenced by things in our environment.
SARAH GREEN: Jonah, this has been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
JONAH BERGER: Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
SARAH GREEN: That was Wharton professor Jonah Berger. His book is called Contagious. For more, including his HBR articles, visit hbr.org.