Why emotions can always detonate the Internet

"Baby, you can't always eat meat, but also eat more vegetables. Vegetables are nutritious and good for a long body. "Suppose a young mother so persuades a child who loves only meat, will the child eat more vegetables because of this? Obviously, this is generally not useful. For children, good food is the most direct and can cause positive emotions, and "nutrition" is somewhat too rational. Just as a baby is born crying, but does not understand anything, emotions are most likely to attract people's attention, and they are also the direct driving force for people to produce behavior. For people, the most primitive and instinctive thing is emotion. We often say: We have heard many truths, but we still can't live this life well. People's emotions and cognition are like the throttle and brakes of a car: emotions make people restless, and cognition makes people calm. Emotions are the underlying logic that induces change, both offline and cyberspace.

In the book "Crazy Transmission", the author summarizes the six principles of communication, and "emotion" is one of the important principles. For something to spread like a virus, it must be filled with emotions. This has also become a "gold standard" for many video bloggers: in the first few seconds of the video, the most important thing is to stimulate the emotions of the audience. For example, the first few seconds of many short videos often clip out the most emotionally resonant parts of the entire video, or cause panic, or make people laugh, or surprise, or cause sympathy, tension, anxiety...

Emotional contagion in cyberspace is also known as the "post-truth" phenomenon, that is, the influence of emotions on public opinion exceeds the influence of facts. In 2016, "post-truth" was selected as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary to describe an unhealthy and abnormal ecology of public opinion, mainly referring to the wide dissemination of media information by relying on incitement and reinforcing prejudice, and its impact far exceeds the impact of objective facts on people.

Cyberspace is more likely to produce post-truth phenomena. The main reasons are: First, the anonymity characteristics of cyberspace make responsibilities relatively scattered, creating and disseminating emotional information on the Internet, not as easy to take responsibility as in real life, and individuals can more boldly express dissatisfaction and anger on the Internet. Second, the amount of information on the Internet makes us more and more unable to pay attention to the facts in all aspects, so the filtering function of the network begins to start, helping us find the most attention-needing and useful information. This may sound like a good thing, but it also makes the information more homogeneous and narrower, so that it makes people more self-righteous, even more radical. Third, in the network, it is easier to meet "like-minded" people. When more and more people are infected by the same emotion, they can form various network groups in a short period of time and produce group polarization. In groups, people are more brash, risky, and extreme than when individual decisions are made.

Emotions are divided into many types, and not all emotions are easily transmitted. Studies have found that emotions with high levels of psychological arousal or activation (e.g., surprise, pleasure, anxiety, anger) are more likely to cause people to share, retweet, and comment, and events that carry high arousal emotions are more likely to spread across the internet. People are social animals, people like to share all kinds of information with others, especially with emotional information, stimulating and activating the emotions of others is itself the best way and method for the self to have an impact on others, and it is also an important source of self-worth. Emotional resonance and emotional resonance are direct representations of interpersonal connections, because they can prove that their feelings are seen and that they become closer to others because of the emotional connection. The stronger the emotion, the more pronounced the feeling of "we" is. Therefore, for particularly funny passages and particularly unexpected stories, we always hope to forward them to our friends. Once sharing begins, the connection between people begins.

Among the many emotions, anger and anxiety are the most likely to detonate the Internet. High-profile online public opinion events often carry strong feelings of anger or anxiety, such as sexism, doctor-patient relationship, housing problems, and educational equity. The social issues involved in these topics have accumulated a certain amount of social sentiment. Therefore, after a key event appears, netizens will use it to express the original emotions, so that sometimes the facts themselves are not so important, what matters is whether something carries the corresponding problem clues and emotional characteristics.

Anger is an inner unpleasant reaction that is caused by feeling unfair and unacceptable frustration. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a worry about future uncertainty. In online public opinion incidents, netizens are more likely to equate themselves with the weak or victims in the incident, and they will think that they may suffer similar injustices and have the same sense of helplessness one day in the future. Therefore, in the governance of network society, we must attach great importance to emotional problems, especially to relieve group anger and anxiety in a timely manner.

(The author is a teacher at the School of Marxism and the Institute of Developmental and Educational Psychology of Wuhan University)

Source: China Youth Daily client