3 things businesses can learn from facebooks controversial experiment - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

3 things businesses can learn from facebooks controversial experiment - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog You may have heard about facebooks controversial psychological experiment in which they altered?what some users saw in their facebook news feeds so that some users saw more positive posts than normal and others saw more negative posts. The?experiment is being slammed in the media and?I honestly think the criticism is?going too far, considering how tiny?the effect was on the subjects. But regardless of whether you like the experiments setup, the results are interesting and apply not only in social networks but potentially also in workplaces. Here are three?lessons workplaces should take to heart. 1: Written communication?is emotionally contagious ?- so watch your email tone The purpose of the experiment was to?examine?emotional contagion, a well-known psychological phenomenon that basically means that?we are affected by the emotions of people around us. Spending time with happy people makes you happier, spending time with sad people makes you sadder, etc. Many experiments have shown that we are affected by people we spend time with, but this is the first experiment to show that emotional contagion also happens through written words alone. This supports the idea that we should watch our language in emails?and other written communication at work, because the words we use can affect the recipients. 2: This?could potentially?snowball The experiment showed that the subjects who saw fewer negative?messages in their newsfeeds increased their own positive output AND reduced the number of negative messages slightly. This means?that increasing positivity in written communications could potentially?have a snowball effect, because people who received?fewer negative messages?would then write fewer negative messages themselves. Of course the opposite is true as well: Seeing more negative messages makes people write more negative and fewer positive messages themselves which has probably already caused a snowball effect in many workplaces. 3: Seeing?fewer emotional messages made people withdraw overall Interestingly, people who saw fewer messages with either positive or negative content shared less on facebook in the following days. Experimenters call it a withdrawal effect. This is?interesting because?many workplaces tend to?suppress?emotions of any kind, which could?theoretically lead to people withdrawing and?being even less likely to express emotions at work. The upshot I want to make this very clear: I am not?arguing for mindless positivity, of for outlawing?negative messages or negative emotions at work. What Im saying is that this experiment indicates that we affect peoples?emotions simply by the words we use and we can use this knowledge actively to?avoid having an unnecessarily negative effect. Your take What are emails in your workplace like? Noticed any patterns? If researchers were to run the same linguistic analysis they ran at facebook, what would they probably find? Have you noticed any effect on yourself? Related posts 9 reasons why workplaces can no longer afford to ignore how people feel Research shows happiness is highly contagious Why Motivation by Pizza doesnt work Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related