From the course: Jonah Berger on Viral Marketing

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Focusing on high-arousal feelings

Focusing on high-arousal feelings

From the course: Jonah Berger on Viral Marketing

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Focusing on high-arousal feelings

- Emotion drives people to share. But do all emotions drive people to share equally? When we think about emotions, we tend to think about two main types, positive and negative emotions. Positive might be things like happiness, excitement, and humor. Negative emotions might be things like anger, anxiety, or sadness. And you might say, "Well, positive emotions drive people "to share, but maybe negative ones don't." When we feel positive, for example, we got a big promotion or we won a new contract or our team won, we're really excited and we share that positive emotion with others. But maybe we don't share negative things, like when our kid does badly in school or when we get fired. When we actually looked at the data, though, we found that people often share negative emotions. For example, angry news articles are one of the most shared things online. We often see our angry political rants get passed along. But also we see…

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