I close attention, thousands of Facebook
users might have noticed that on 11 January 2012, their friends were
slightly happier than usual. At the same time, thousands of others
may have spotted that their friends were sadder than expected. But
even if they did notice a change in what their friends were posting
online, it wasn’t genuine change in their friends’ behaviour. It was an
experiment.
Researchers at Facebook and Cornell University had wanted to
explore how emotions spread online, so they’d altered people’s News
Feeds for a week and tracked what happened. The team published
the results in early 2014. By tweaking what people were exposed to,
they found that emotion was contagious: people who saw fewer
positive posts had on average posted less positive content
themselves, and vice versa. In hindsight, this result might seem
unsurprising, but at the time it ran counter to a popular notion. Before
the experiment, many people believed that seeing cheerful content on
Facebook could make us feel inadequate, and hence less happy.[32]
The research itself soon sparked a lot of negative emotions, with
several scientists and journalists questioning how ethical it was to run
such a study. ‘Facebook manipulated users’ moods in secret
experiment,’ read one headline in the Independent. One prominent
argument was that the team should have obtained consent, asking
whether users were happy to participate in the study.[33]
Looking at how design influences people’s behaviour is not
necessarily unethical. Indeed, medical organisations regularly run
randomised experiments to work out how to encourage healthy
behaviour. For example, they might send one type of reminder about
cancer screening to some people and a different one to others, and
then see which gets the best response.[34] Without these kinds of
experiments, it would be difficult to work out how much a particular
approach actually shifted people’s behaviour.
If an experiment could have a detrimental effect on users, though,
researchers need to consider alternatives. In the Facebook study, the
team could have waited for a ‘natural experiment’ – like rainy weather
- to change people’s emotional state, or they could have tried to
answer the same research question with fewer users. Even so, it may