WhatMakesonlineContentViral-JonahBerger.pdf

Journal of Marketing Research, Ahead of Print DOI: 10.1509/jmr.10.0353 *Jonah Berger is Joseph G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing (e-mail: jberger@), and Katherine L. Milkman is Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management (e-mail: kmilkman@ ), the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Michael Buckley, Jason Chen, Michael Durkheimer, Henning Krohnstad, Heidi Liu, Lauren McDevitt, Areeb Pirani, Jason Pollack, and Ronnie Wang all provided helpful research assistance. Hector Castro and Premal Vora created the web crawler that made this project possible, and Roger Booth and James W. Pennebaker provided access to LIWC. Devin Pope and Bill Simpson provided helpful suggestions on our analysis strategy. Thanks to Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Jonathan Haidt, Chip Heath, Yoshi Kashima, Dacher Keltner, Kim Peters, Mark Schaller, Deborah Small, and Andrew Stephen for helpful comments on prior versions of the article. The Dean’s Research Initiative and the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative helped fund this research. Ravi Dhar served as associate editor for this article. Jonah Berger and Katherine L. MiLKMan* Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? this article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. the results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. these results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically us