Overestimation in the Aggregation of Emotional Intensity of Social Media Content

Users on social media are regularly presented with sequences of emotional content in theirnewsfeeds, which affects their viewpoints and emotions. Could the way users aggregate andremember emotional content from their feeds contribute to the fact emotions are amplified onsocial platforms? Across five studies (N = 1,051), using experimentally manipulated social mediafeeds, we found that participants consistently overestimated the average emotional intensity ofthe individual responses expressed by other users in a sequence (Study 1a). This overestimationled to stronger emotional reactions to the news content that these responses were reacting to(Study 1b). Investigating the mechanism suggested that while there was stronger memory formore emotional responses within a response sequence, we could not find a direct link betweenmemory and overestimation (Study 2). We showed that overestimation was driven mainly by thesalience of emotional intensity of different items in the sequence, by replicating the effect usingsequences of emotional words (Study 3). We then turned to the consequences of overestimation,showing that overestimation of emotional sequences was uniquely associated with perceivingmore intense emotional responses as more representative of how other people would react(Study 4), and with overestimation of the emotionality of the newsfeed as a whole (Study 5).Overestimation of the average individual emotional intensity ratings of a sequence was alsopredictive of willingness to share articles. This set of findings sheds light on how sampling fromnewsfeeds amplifies the perception of emotionality.