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Reconsidering evidence of moral contagion in online social networks

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1629–1635 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The ubiquity of social media use and the digital data traces it produces has triggered a potential methodological shift in the psychological sciences away from traditional, laboratory-based experimentation. The hope is that, by using computational social science methods to analyse large-scale observational data from social media, human behaviour can be studied with greater statistical power and ecological validity. However, current standards of null hypothesis significance testing and correlational statistics seem ill-suited to markedly noisy, high-dimensional social media datasets. We explore this point by probing the moral contagion phenomenon, whereby the use of moral-emotional language increases the probability of message spread. Through out-of-sample prediction, model comparisons and specification curve analyses, we find that the moral contagion model performs no better than an implausible XYZ contagion model. This highlights the risks of using purely correlational evidence from large observational datasets and sounds a cautionary note for psychology’s merge with big data.

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Fig. 1: Qualitative results of SCA.
Fig. 2: Specification curves for moral contagion and XYZ contagion effects.

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Data availability

The data files analysed in this study are publicly available. For the COVID-19 and #MuellerReport corpora, which were specifically collected for this study, the tweet IDs have been made available on OSF, but not the tweet text due to restrictions set by Twitter. To access the pre-existing corpora, see refs. 19,20,21,22, or follow the links from the OSF project page directing to the original hosting sites (https://osf.io/4zjk6/).

Code availability

All scripts used for the analyses presented in this article are available on the OSF project page (https://osf.io/4zjk6/).

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Acknowledgements

The authors received no specific funding for this work and thank the Causal Cognition Lab at University College London for their helpful feedback on this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Jason W. Burton & Ulrike Hahn

  2. School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Nicole Cruz

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  1. Jason W. Burton
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  2. Nicole Cruz
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  3. Ulrike Hahn
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Contributions

J.W.B. and U.H. designed the research. J.W.B. and N.C. analysed the data. J.W.B wrote the paper, and all authors contributed to revisions.

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Correspondence to Jason W. Burton.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Human Behaviour thanks Morteza Dehghani and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. The editors also thank William Brady and Jay Van Bavel for providing signed comments.

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Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Results, Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary Figs. 1–9 and Supplementary References.

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Burton, J.W., Cruz, N. & Hahn, U. Reconsidering evidence of moral contagion in online social networks. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1629–1635 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01133-5

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