Catching fire: What goes viral and why? With Jonah Berger, PhD

Why do some ideas, products, news stories and trends spread like wildfire, while others disappear? Jonah Berger, PhD, discusses the science of what catches on; the psychological forces that drive word of mouth, including social currency and high-arousal emotions like awe and anger; whether online and offline sharing differ; and what his research can tell us about the spread of misinformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine-leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.

• 0:56Kim Mills?

  Think about the last thing you shared online or via email with someone else. A funny video on TikTok, a news story you thought your friends would enjoy, or a new phrase you've been hearing everywhere. Chances are you didn't share it randomly. Something about it grabbed you and made you think, I have to pass this along. Every day, we're bombarded with information, stories, ideas, and words. But we only feel compelled to share a fraction of that. Why? Why do some things catch on, traveling through networks of conversations, texts, and social media, while others disappear? And what can psychology tell us about why we share what we do? Do we share things differently online and in person? How are the changing social media landscape

• 1:40Kim Mills?

  and artificial intelligence affecting how ideas spread?

• 1:48Kim Mills?

  Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 2:02Kim Mills?

  My guest today is Dr. Jonah Berger, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a leading researcher on word of mouth, social influence, and how ideas spread. He's the author of four books, including Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way, and Contagious: Why Things Catch On. He's published more than 80 articles in academic journals, and his research has been covered widely in mainstream media. His work looks at the psychological principles that help explain why certain products, messages, and ideas become popular, and how those same principles show up in our everyday conversations. Dr. Berger, thank you for joining me today.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:43Kim Mills?

  So I talked a moment ago about viral trends. A lot of people think that going viral is just due to chance or luck, but you've discovered there are patterns to what takes off. So more broadly, how does psychology drive what we share?

• 2:58Speaker 03

  You know, it's so interesting, because we've all seen examples of things that catch on, right? Whether they be products at the grocery store, videos on social media, apps that everyone's telling us to download. But we often think it's random luck or chance why they became popular, that you just have to catch lightning in a bottle, or something along those lines. But it turns out there's actually really a science behind it. We've analyzed thousands of pieces of online content, tens of thousands of brands, and millions of purchases, both around the United States and around the world. And again and again, we see the same science coming up, the same six factors driving things to catch on and be shared. And so at the core, it's really about the psychology of social transmission.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Why do we talk about certain things rather than others? Why do we share, you know, what we're doing this weekend, or not talk about something that happened last weekend? And what about that science can help us understand why things become popular?

• 3:54Kim Mills?

  And you've explained this in something you've called the steps framework, these six psychological reasons that people share things. Can you talk about what those steps are?

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Sure. So steps is an acronym and there's kind of six, six key dimensions there. The first S stands for social currency. The T stands for triggers. The E stands for motion. The first P is public. The second P is practical value. And the last S is stories. And each of those is a psychological driver of why people talk and, and why they share. It's, it's not about certain products versus ideas versus services. It's not about, you know, business to consumer versus business to business. It's not about expensive things versus cheap things. It's, it's really about the science of why things get passed on, right? Why do we talk about some things that happened to us last weekend and not others? Why do we talk about certain trips or vacations we took years ago, but, but not other ones?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  And how does all this help us understand why things catch on?

• 4:55Kim Mills?

  And the first reason you cite is social currency. The idea that people share things that make them look good or smart or knowledgeable. Why is social currency such a powerful driver of what we share?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Sure. Is it all right if I tell a story for a minute?

• 5:11Kim Mills?

  Absolutely.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's this place in New York City, and I'm sure some of your listeners are from New York City, but many other folks have been there before. And so imagine you're walking around on like the Lower East Side of New York City. Your stomach is rumbling. You gotta get a bite to eat. When you notice a big hot dog shaped sign out in front of a restaurant with the words, eat me written on it, it would look like mustard. Say, huh, I haven't had a hot dog in a while. I'll check this place out. So you walk down a flight of stairs into a restaurant called Criff Dogs. And this place has an amazing range of hot dogs, right? It has a good morning hot dog with bacon, eggs and cheese. A hot dog with an onion and pineapple, traditional New York style water dog. So to every hot dog that you can imagine. But if you finish eating your hot dog, You might notice in the corner of the room is a phone booth.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  One of those old things that Clark Kent might jump into to change into Superman. And so walk into the phone booth, slide open that door and walk inside. And on the wall, you'll see something you probably haven't seen in like 30 or 40 years potentially even. It's a rotary dial phone, one of those phones you have to stick your finger into and go around in a circle. And so just for fun, stick your finger and say the number three, go around in a circle and hold the receiver up to your ear. Well, the phone will actually ring. It'll go ring, ring, and then someone will pick up the other line and they'll ask you whether you have a reservation. And I remember the first time I heard this story. I said, I'm sitting in a phone booth inside of a hot dog restaurant. What will a person have a reservation for?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  But if you're lucky and they happen to have space or a friend of yours happen to make a reservation, the back of that phone booth will open and you'll be led into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell. Now, Please Don't Tell has violated all the traditional laws of marketing and communications. There's no sign on the street, no sign inside the restaurant. They've done everything they can to make themselves difficult to find. And yet, every day they're full. 3pm, phone lines open up. By 3:30, all the seats are usually gone. You have to redial again and again, trying to get through. I actually went and visited Please Don't Tell. It took me a couple of weeks to get in and I got in on like a Tuesday night at like 6pm, not the most popular time. And you might say, well, you know, maybe they're popular because it's lack of competition. But look around, that's not the case, right?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  And so what did Please Don't Tell do to cut through the clutter? And if you think about it, they did something really interesting. They made themselves a secret. And let me tell you a little secret about secrets, right? Think about the last time that someone told you something and they told you not to tell anyone else. And if you think about it, what's the first thing you did with that information? Well, you probably told someone. Why? Because having access to information that no one else has makes you look smart and makes you look in the know. It gives you what I'll call social currency. So it's not just secrets, right? So you might say, okay, well, I get it. People like sharing secrets, but there's something much more fundamental there, which is people like sharing things. That make them look good, right? The better something makes people look, the more like they are to share it.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  And the worse something makes people look, the less like they are to share it. If you, if you think about it, right? Your kid gets an A in school, they might be very happy to tell everyone. If they get a, a B minus or a C, they might be less likely to talk about it. You do really well playing a round of golf, you, you talk about it, but you do badly, maybe you're less likely to talk about it. You get some limited edition product that, you know, nobody else has or everybody else wants. Maybe you talk about it, you don't get, you know, a promotion at the office, maybe you're less likely to talk about it. And so we pick and choose among the things that happen to us. Sharing the ones that make us look good and avoiding sharing the ones that make us look bad, right? If you look online, most posts on social media tend to be positive.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Hey, look at me, I'm, you know, I met a celebrity, look at me, I got a new car, look at, look at me, I'm on vacation. Very few people post photos saying, you know, hey, look at me, I'm, I'm at the office, working on Excel spreadsheet, you know, check out column C. Most of us spend a lot more time working on, on Excel spreadsheet at the office than we do on vacation. Yet we share the vacation photos and not the Excel spreadsheet stuff because it makes us look better. And so in, in some sense, we pick and choose among the set of options that is our life. And one reason we share things is because it makes us look good. If something makes us look better, we share it. If it makes us look less good, we, we don't. And so it's really interesting to think about the range of things that impacts, right?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  So think about frequent flyer status and people love bragging about that. Think about, you know, a new artist has a music album out and people love talking about it. Think about, you know, information that people might have, whether it's about an impending snowstorm or, you know, access to a product that not everyone else does. The more we have access to something that makes us look smart, special in the know, that not everyone else has, the more likely we are to talk about and share it, whether it's a, a secret. Whether it's just a cool product or an interesting idea, people love being ahead of the curve, but status is only good in some sense if if other people know that you have it. And so one way to get status is to talk about something, right?

• 10:16Speaker 03

  People don't care about the airline that gives them frequent flyer status, but the only way to talk about their status is to mention the airline, and that gets to come along for the ride. And so, you know, whether it's smart brands and organizations or smart people who want to get others to talk about ideas, one really powerful question is, well, how can we make that audience feel like insiders? Often, we think a lot about ourselves, right? Even as researchers, we publish some great research. We want to put it out there. We think a lot about how's it going to make me look when it shows up on LinkedIn? But we think a lot less about, well, how's it going to make someone who reads about it look if they talk about it to someone else? Because the better it's going to make them look, the more likely they're going to be to pass it on.

• 10:59Kim Mills?

  One other part of why we share things is that there's a story. I mean, we want people to, you know, be emotionally involved in the thing that we're sharing with them because we are. And I'm just wondering, what makes stories such a powerful vehicle?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you mentioned two words there. You talked both about emotion, the E in the framework, and the last S, the stories. And so maybe we'll take them in turn. In terms of emotion, you know, I think we've all seen examples of content that goes viral online or stories people share offline that have a lot of emotion.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  You know, you look at YouTube, for example. You might say, wow, there's lots of funny videos on YouTube. And you look at angry political rants on social media, and you might say there's a lot of things there as well. And so you might say, well, hey, maybe any emotion gets shared. You know, the more people care, the more they share. And indeed, there is some data suggesting that emotions drive sharing, that that any emotion can increase the chance that people share. You know, there's some very nice old work showing that, you know, people share many of the emotional things that happen to them on a on a daily basis, whether it's to, you know, build bonds with social others or whether it's to vent about something. Thing they're upset about, whether this helps sort of figure out what they're feeling,

• 12:17Speaker 03

  right? Are they sad? Are they angry? And so sharing those emotions can help people themselves figure out what it is they're they're feeling. But we wondered, okay, well, are all emotions equilightly to get shared? Or are some emotions more likely to be shared than others? And and you might say, well, maybe people share positive emotions, and they avoid sharing negative ones. And that intuitively makes sense. But as we've just talked about, there there are good examples of negative stuff being shared, right? You look at negative angry political rants, or there's a website called Dell Hell, where people share negative customer service experiences with Dell. And so there are certainly some negative things that also get a lot of attention. And so do all emotions get shared, or are some shared more than others? And so we actually examined this question empirically a few years ago.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  And Katie Milkman and I did a paper where we looked at basically six months of New York Times articles. Everything written over the over that period by the paper, everything from front page news and sports to style and political stuff, you know, thousands of articles in the newspaper. Some of those articles make what's called the most emailed list, which is the list of articles that are highly shared, and most don't. And so one question is, why? What about some articles made them to be more likely to make the most emailed list? And and let's be careful, right? One reason could just be they're featured. An article that appears on the top of the homepage, for example, probably gets read by more people than one that appears on the bottom of the homepage, potentially.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And so maybe it's just the articles that are featured. And so we controlled for that. You might also say, well, maybe it's how famous the author is, right? Maybe if a a really famous politician or musician writes an article, that gets shared a lot. And and if regular, you know, Joes and Janes write articles, it doesn't. So we controlled for that. It might be that certain sections of the paper get shared more than others because they're read more, or because people pay more attention to them. And we controlled for that as well. But what we were really interested in is that that question we started with, which is emotion. And so we took all these articles, and first we measured the amount of emotion they evoked. Did they evoke more emotion or or less emotion? We also Whether they evoked positive emotions or negative emotions using Jamie Pennebaker's

• 14:29Speaker 03

  great linguistic inquiry and word count, measuring, you know, the positivity or the negativity of those articles. And sure enough, by the way, we found that more emotional content was more likely to make the most emailed list. It turned out consistent with what we kind of talked about already, that positive emotion was shared more than negative emotion. But we didn't, we didn't stop there. We dug into specific emotions as well, right? Both sadness and anger are negative emotions. But we wondered if there might be some differences in how like those emotions are to be shared. And sure enough, when we looked at the data, we found something interesting. It wasn't that all negative emotions decrease sharing. In fact, while some negative emotions like sadness decrease sharing, other negative emotions like anger had the exact opposite effect, right?

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Anger actually increased the likelihood that articles were to make the most emailed list. And so, one question we already started asking ourselves is why, right? What separates anger and sadness? And how might that differentiate sharing? We weren't sure right away. And then we noticed something kind of surprising in the content, which is that science articles were actually doing pretty well. And as a scientist myself, I found that pretty heartening. But you look at them and they're not always the broadest pieces, right? So you know, a question about like deer vision and how camouflage clothes can be made so that, you know, deer can't see them, or, you know, deepest recesses of our, the universe and whether there are additional planets and stars,

• 15:57Speaker 03

  kind of things that are niche in some ways, but we're getting a lot of attention. And we wondered why. And what we realized is that many of these articles evoked an emotion, people often describe as awe, right? This, this notion of inspiration, kind of widening one's perspective. And we said, okay, interesting. So we included awe in the model. Sure enough, the more awe content evoked, the more likely it would be to be shared. But that still didn't explain the difference between anger and sadness. And so we were trying to say, okay, well, what does awe have in common? It increases sharing with anger. In some ways, they're pretty different, right? Awe is a positive emotion. Anger is a negative emotion. But even though they're Difference in their valence, they actually have a lot in common on another different underlying dimension, which is the amount of physiological arousal they evoke.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Think about if you're camping in the woods and you hear a noise, your fight or flight response goes off, you know, you're ready to run away from whatever it might be. Or think about what happens when your team loses a big game, you're angry, you want to throw something. Emotions are often characterized by physiological arousal, whether you're fired up and ready to take action, or whether you're powered down and deactivated. And what we found is it's not just about whether emotions are positive or negative. Any high arousal emotion, whether positive or negative, increased sharing. Anger, right, fires us up to take action, and one of those actions we can take is sharing. Sadness powers us down, we don't want to do very much, right? When you think about being sad, you want to eat a big bowl of macaroni and cheese

• 17:26Speaker 03

  or ice cream, depending on your preferences, put on a sweatshirt and, you know, sort of be cozy. You don't want to do very much. And so it turns out any of these emotions that fire us up to take action encourage us to share, which is actually pretty interesting if you think about it, because you might say, well, okay, you know, funny YouTube videos are completely different than angry political rants. And in some ways, they are completely different. One is a positive emotion, one is a negative emotion, you know, one makes us laugh, one makes us frustrated. But they actually have a lot in common, which is that both of those things are high arousal. Humor is a high arousal emotion and anger is a high arousal emotion. And I think this has some pretty important takeaways for individuals that are interested in getting ideas to catch on or products or services, you know.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Often, we think about, okay, as long as we make people feel good, happy, positive, they'll pass stuff on. But it's not enough, right? Contentment is a positive emotion, it feels pretty good to be content. But when you walk out of an exercise class or a yoga class, you feel pretty good, but you don't want to do very much. You're not going to share something, you're not going to pass it on, because you feel deactivated rather than activated. And so on the positive side, it's not just enough to make people feel good. We've got to make them feel that high arousal, and we've got to fire them up to take action. To want to pass something on and and on the negative side, you know, sure, we don't want to make people feel negative emotions, but taking advantage of the negative emotions they may already feel can be a great way to encourage them to to share, whether it's

• 18:56Speaker 03

  related to a political cause or an issue they have in a certain space, a problem they wish was different. By understanding those negative emotions they're already feeling, those high arousal negative emotions they're already feeling, we can encourage them to pass all sorts of things on.

• 19:13Kim Mills?

  Out of the the six reasons that people share things, the steps, as you call them, are they all of equal value or does one hold sway over another?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  You know, it really depends on on the situation to some degree. And and if you look at things that often get a lot of attention, you know, quote unquote, go viral around the web, often they have at least one ingredient that they do very well on, one of the six, but it's not necessarily to have all all six. Rarely do things have all six. We did an analysis, for example, of of online versus offline word of mouth, looking at, you know, brands that consumers would describe as more interesting and and products and services and brands that people would describe as as less interesting, right? So, you know, no offense to, I don't know, let's say, eraser companies, but erasers probably aren't

• 20:07Speaker 03

  the most interesting product and service people think of, whereas high tech products tend to be a little bit more interesting. And so we looked at whether interesting products and brands and services get talked about more than than boring ones. And what we found actually surprised us a little bit. So there's data both on online and offline word of mouth. And we found that sure enough, if you look online, interesting stuff tends to get talked about more than boring stuff. Interesting products and services, on average, tend to get talked about more than boring products and services on average. And so we did that same analysis, though, offline, looking at offline word of mouth. And there we found there was actually no effect. Interesting products or services didn't get talked about

• 20:49Speaker 03

  more than than less interesting ones. And when we thought about it, we realized there's a sort of A difference between kind of online and offline sharing, right? So, so online sharing is often you have a choice. Do I want to share something or not? Or, you know, I'm talking about something, I could, could share anything. What am I going to pick to share about? And so it's often, the question is not, do I want to share something? But is it above a threshold? Is it good enough to share? And so in those situations, I might say, well, let me talk about the really interesting thing I did and, and not the boring one. Offline word of mouth, on the other hand, is often much more synchronous, right? Someone asks us a question and we have to fill in that conversational space.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  We have to say something and we have to say something relatively quickly. And so we don't necessarily have time to think about what's the most interesting thing I could talk about or share. It tends to be a little bit more about what's top of mind, right? What am I thinking about right now when you ask a question or when I'm having a conversation? What's the most relevant thing I can think of? Let me talk about that. And that really gets into less the S, that's social currency and more the T, the, the triggers, right? So triggers is all about top of mind means tip of tongue. The more likely we're to be thinking about something, the more likely we are to, to talk about and, and share it. If you look, for example, you know, many people talk about the weather. And you might say, you know, winter weather aside, which is obviously very important, you know, if schools are closing and the like.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  But, you know, why do people talk so often about the weather? It's not the most interesting thing that, that happens to us, but it is top of mind. It is something that's around us all the time. And so the question isn't just, you know, uh, do we like something? Does it make us look good? Or does it evoke higher arousal motions? But are we thinking about it? If we're not thinking about something, it's really unlikely that we'll, we'll talk about it. And so this also, I think, has some interesting implications, right? You think about what a trigger is, it's in some sense, a reminder in the environment to, to think about something. A cue in the environment that makes us think about something we weren't thinking about already. So if I said peanut butter and, for example, many of your listeners would probably think of jelly. Or if I said rum and they might think of Coke.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  In some sense, they're environmental reminders that encourage us to, to think about something. And so the more we want someone to talk about or share something that relates to us, our product, our service, our idea, the more we need to think about, well, what are those triggers or cues in the environment that are going to make them talk about it? There's a famous campaign from the candy bar Kit Kat, for example, that did a great job of boosting sales, not because it changed how much people liked the brand, but it just made them think about it more often. It linked Kit Kat and coffee. You know, having a coffee break, have a Kit Kat. Thinking about coffee, think about Kit Kat. Coffee and Kit Kat, Kit Kat and coffee, best friends forever. That campaign made people think more often about Kit Kat because lots of people drink coffee and they drink it

• 23:43Speaker 03

  really frequently. And so now coffee became a trigger to bring the brand to mind. And the more it was top of mind, the more it was tip of the tongue.

• 23:51Kim Mills?

  We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk with Dr. Berger about social media and whether it has changed what we share.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.

• 24:56Kim Mills?

  If I could switch gears for a minute and talk about the book Contagious that you wrote more than a decade ago, which I think was in many ways, you know, very almost prescient. This has taken off in ways that we could never have imagined. I'm just wondering, though, that the social media landscape has changed since then, and there are more platforms, and we've got these AI algorithms that are pushing all kinds of things to us. Has that changed the types of information that we're sharing?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great, a great question. And you know, I think it's important, though, when thinking about that question, to not just look at the now, but look at the past as well. Right? So first, it's really easy when we think about word of mouth and things going viral, per se, to think online, to think about social media. And indeed, in today's day and age, social media drives a good bit of sharing. But much word of mouth, by some estimates, not even potentially most word of mouth, is still offline. It's still face to face. And, and further, you know, the first example of word of mouth didn't happen when social media came around. It was when people started communicating, right? It was one caveman, probably, or one cave woman telling another, you know, don't eat that. It's, it's poisonous.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Word of mouth has been around forever. Has, has social media changed word of mouth? Yes, in some ways, it's made it faster and easier to share things with more people more quickly. Right? It used to be that if you told your neighbor something, and they told another person, they told another person, it would take a while for it to diffuse. In today's day and age, if you broadcast something on social media, lots of people can see it very quickly, even across different geographies. And so it has the opportunity to spread more broadly, more quickly. But that's not the only way that things get shared. I actually, it's, it's funny enough, you know, some people say, oh, you know, you must have gotten started studying this by studying social media. I actually got started in this area by studying rumors and urban legends.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  So I was an undergraduate at Stanford University. I read this book my grandmother recommended it called The Tipping Point, which some of you may remember, you know, great book. And I decided I was interested in studying that sort of stuff. And I was looking for an advisor to work with. And there was this guy who had just joined Stanford in the business school. His name was Chip Heath. And he was interested in what makes urban legends get shared. And it's, it's hard to remember now, but you know, back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, nobody was interested in rumors and urban legends, right? Everyone was like, oh, rumors and urban legends are kids' stuff. Who cares? You know, nobody shares false information. I was the, I was the worst person to have at a party, right? Because someone would share an urban legend and I'd say, no, no.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not real. That's this thing that, you know, often circulates. But, but it turns out the drivers that, that shape rumors and urban legends getting shared are the same things that shape whether we talk about products or services or other sorts of ideas. And so, sure, you know, is social media on the margins changing sharing? In some ways it is, but the platforms come and go, right? You know, if we, if we looked in the early 2000s, right? You might've said, what drives sharing? MySpace, you know, it's all about MySpace. And then it was Foursquare and, and then it was Facebook. And the list goes on and on of new technologies that pop up that, that take a chunk of the online sharing and, and they still do and they will in the future.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  But I think much, if not most of sharing is still offline. And the psychological drivers of why we share aren't necessarily different, right? You know, in the 1950s and 60s, people still cared about looking good to others. The way they shared might've been different. There was no social media and so it was, you know, in the boardroom or at a dinner party or on the phone. But that underlying motivation was the same. Similarly, you know, that idea of triggers, top of mind, tip of tongue, that's not new. People, accessibility, right? The psychology of cognitive accessibility, it's been studied for decades at, at this point. And so all we're doing here is we're saying, well, hey, this really drives sharing, this domain that hasn't been thought about as, as much.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  And so, sure, on the margins, does social change sharing? Sure, it, it shifts things a little bit. And, and sure, there are differences between online and offline sharing. Just like, by the way, there are differences between sharing on different platforms based on the, the rules and approaches of those platforms. But I think the more we understand the psychology, rather than just focusing on the technology, the more insightful and correct we can be, right? Even, even think about sharing on quote unquote, social media. There are different ways to do it. I can broadcast something to all my followers or I can choose to narrow cast it to just one or a couple of people. And we've done work that finds, for example, that the, that difference, both of them are online, both are in some sense, sharing on social media, but that shapes the kind of things that we share.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  When we share to a broad group, when we broadcast, we tend to focus on ourselves. Whereas when we narrow cast, we're more likely to think about our audience. We're less likely to be egocentric. And so we're more likely to share things that are useful or valuable to them. And so that's less about the technology per se and more about the psychology of social transmission.

• 30:07Kim Mills?

  Does your research offer any ideas on how to fight viral misinformation?

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, this is a question I've I've thought about a lot. It's disheartening to see how much misinformation goes around. I often work with nonprofits, organizations, say, God, you know, why doesn't our good valuable stuff get shared as much as the the false stuff? And and I often bring up an analogy. I talk about Brussels sprouts. You know, if you ask people which is tastier, Brussels sprouts or a cheeseburger? Everyone will pick the cheeseburger. It's not that the Brussels sprouts aren't good for you. It's just the way cheeseburger is designed fits better with the way your tongue and stomach are designed. Right? It it, you know, makes your brain light up. It it does all these things. It's just it's just plain tastier. And so, you know, organizations want people to eat healthier. They say, hey, your fruits and vegetables.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  But the cheeseburger is alluring when it's late at night, when we're on the road or the tired that the cheeseburger beckons. And so what can we do if we're the Brussels sprouts? And and the answer is not, I'm not saying be the cheeseburger. But what I am saying is, is think about how you cook the Brussels sprouts. Right? When I was growing up, Brussels sprouts were like the worst thing my parents could cook. They because they would steam them. And I don't know about you, but steamed Brussels sprouts are not particularly good. And so there was a whole like decade of my life where I basically boycotted Brussels sprouts. And and then I moved to Philadelphia and I went to a new American restaurant. And they had roasted Brussels sprouts or, you know, whatever it was, a little bit of olive oil and a little bit of salt. And someone at the table ordered them and I thought they'd be terrible. And I tried one and they were delicious.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  And then I started eating a bunch more Brussels sprouts. And so it wasn't about, hey, taking the nutritious stuff and and make it a cheeseburger. It was cooking it different in a way that was easier for. People to digest and I think that's the important way to think about it, right? If we've got true, if we've got valuable, if we've got useful information, we can't just sit there and say, you know, I wish it were different, right? People are wrong, they're biased. We have to say, well, hold on. People are going to share what people are going to share. How by understanding why people share things? Can I engineer my good, my truthful, my valuable stuff? So it's more likely to be shared. You know, most people are sharing misinformation, aren't sharing it because they know it's misinformation or they want to diffuse misinformation.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  They're sharing it for the same reasons we already talked about, right? It evokes social currency. It makes them look good. It's surprising, it's novel. It makes them look like an insider. It evokes higher arousal emotion, that E in the steps framework, right? It makes them angry, it makes them excited. It inspires them and so they pass it on, not thinking about the fact that it might not be real. It's top of mind, right? Top of mind, more likely to be tip of tongue, that triggers idea. The more they're thinking about it, the more likely they are to pass it on. And so to fight misinformation, it's not about, you know, saying, oh, I wish things were different. It's about saying, how can I take that good stuff? That Brussels sprouts, those nutritious, valuable information? And, and cook it in a way that's easier to understand,

• 33:13Speaker 03

  that's easier to digest and that's easier to transmit. I think, you know, unfortunately, both scientists and nonprofits have this thing often in common, which is they just assume, look, if this stuff is good enough, it'll win, right? We assume that we just have good enough research. If we are a good enough cause, that it will win. And unfortunately, good stuff isn't always enough. There's so many pieces of interesting research. There's so many good causes out there that people can't necessarily give their attention or their money or their shares to all of them. And so the stuff that wins is going to be the stuff that fits best with people. If we understand that science of social transmission, we can help the good, the valuable and the truthful stuff win out.

• 33:54Kim Mills?

  What about the role of repetition? I mean, the fact that something gets repeated over and over again to a point where people can't tell anymore whether it's true or not. Do you look at that?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I haven't looked a lot at that specifically. There's certainly research that suggests that repetition can make some information more believable. There's also research on repetition in advertising that shows that, you know, if you hear something too many times, it gets annoying, or you know, you get bored of it, or you dislike it in certain ways. And so I think there's, there's lots of interesting research going on, trying to encourage people to be smarter consumers of information, right? To, to think twice when they, they read something or come across something. But, but I think the biggest thing for me is to stop treating false information and, and true information is completely different classes of things, right? To most people, it's just information.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  And so the question is, what drives people to share information in the first place? And, and that's where the steps can be really helpful.

• 34:52Kim Mills?

  How is technology changing the way you do your research and the kinds of things that you're looking at?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  You know, that's a, that's a great question. And, and one of my first forays in this space was this old article at this point on what makes online content viral, where we used, you know, very basic natural language processing tool, basically a dictionary that counted the number of positive words and negative words. And in some ways, when I look back at that, it was very rudimentary, right? You know, given the, the technology that's out there now, machine learning, natural language processing tools that are available, that we've used in lots of follow-up projects, in some ways, it was, it was very rudimentary, but it was also very powerful. And so I think, you know, we've been so lucky to have tools like linguistic inquiry and word count to build on now.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Now there are more sophisticated things out there, but that was, and still is, a great tool to begin to introduce people to these areas. But, you know, we've used lots of different tools. We've done topic modeling, for example, which extracts the main topic or themes of, of songs to look at what makes songs successful. We found that songs whose lyrics are more atypical from their genre. Tend to be more popular, tend to rise higher on the billboard charts. So think about, you know, Lil Nas X and his song Old Town Road, right? It wasn't completely country and it wasn't completely hip hop. It was sort of this weird mix of the two and it was one of the most successful songs on billboard ever because it was different than its genres. We've also

• 36:23Speaker 03

  looked at, you know, starting to look at not just language, but also vocal features or audio features or visual features. We recently did a project looking at hand gestures. One of my colleagues is Italian and, you know, people say, oh, Italians, they always talk with their hands. And so he was saying, well, you know, is that actually true? And, you know, is talking with your hands useful? And so we analyzed thousands, hundreds, if not thousands of TED Talks and the amount of engagement they received and specifically looked at how much the speakers moved their hands. And we found that when speakers moved their hands more, their talks received more engagement. But it wasn't just that any hand movements were beneficial. Certain

• 37:04Speaker 03

  types of hand movements were more beneficial than than others. Certain types of movements illustrate what we're saying. If I say, you know, I caught a really big fish and I, you can't see my hands right now, but imagine I'm putting my hands sort of wide to show how big the fish is, or, you know, really, these are the steps to success and I move my hands in a stepwise motion. That visual illustration of what I'm talking about can help the audience understand what we're saying. Whereas just scratching my nose or, you know, clapping my hands may get attention, but it's not as likely to lead to understanding. And so really, you know, these tools are unlocking a variety of sources of data, whether it be textual, linguistic data, whether it be audio features and how quickly we speak, or, you know, whether

• 37:49Speaker 03

  we pause in between utterances or, or visual features, right? Things like the way we move our hands or facial expressions or body language. All of these things can really help us understand how to communicate more effectively and, and why products, services and ideas catch on.

• 38:06Kim Mills?

  So to wrap up, what are you working on now? What are the big questions you're still trying to answer?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  You know, I think similar to what we just talked about, a lot of these automated content analysis tools to understand why things catch on. We're beginning to look at how things combine, right? So obviously, it's not just the words that someone uses. It's the way they use those words and in combination with the audio features they utter and the visual features, if they're there. You know, if you you look at live stream influencers, live streams, for example, where they sell products, you know, it's about how they combine all these different modalities together. We have a project, for example, looking at how influencers convey empathy, both using their language, but also their body language and also their audio, the way they utter

• 38:57Speaker 03

  those words combines to think about impact. And so doing a lot of work on multimodal communication, also thinking a lot about a very fundamental marketing question, but one I find very interesting, which is, is what are we selling? And how is whether we're communicators, individuals, companies, organizations, we more effectively get our messages and ideas out there by understanding our audience and really thinking about what is that thing that we're selling and how do we add value for them? You know, I think I used the phrase before, good stuff isn't enough, but I find that very challenging. I, you know, consult with lots of companies and organizations and often, whether it's

• 39:38Speaker 03

  an entrepreneur or a social cause, you know, often there are really good products, services and ideas that don't take off. And so I think a lot about how to help both individuals and organizations make that that good stuff spread more effectively.

• 39:53Kim Mills?

  Well, Dr. Berger, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting, I think, explains a lot for our audience.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 40:01Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening to the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.

• 41:11Speaker 04

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