The Facebook Prison Experiment The real mind game is the overreaction to a benign social study. The uproar over what the critics call Facebooks FB -0.24% secret emotional manipulation study continues to rage, proving that nothing in modern life is safe from the online tantrum industry. Trigger warning: Social networkers are not obligated to share the details of their private lives with a free website. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper that for some reason became front-page news this week tweaked Facebooks news feed to expose one group to fewer posts with negative sad words, while others saw fewer positive happy words. The exercise lasted a week and involved about 700,000 or 0.04% of unwitting Facebookers. Lo and behold, lead researcher Adam Kramer of Facebook discovered that mood mirrored the content that users saw, but only to a minimal degree. Participants produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week, he observed. So someone whose feed was altered to de-emphasize positive material posted 0.1% fewer positive words. The Stanford Prison Experiment this was not. A Facebook Inc. Like logo Bloomberg Do social media make people feel worse about themselves? On net, likely not. Yet answering this trivia question is being inflated into a public health crisis. The aggrieved claim that Facebook endangered those with psychological problems like depression and that the company failed to obtain informed consent. People whose sensitivities are so delicate should probably consult Facebooks data use policy, which allows personal information to be applied to testing and research that improves the websites services. Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg leaned out and quasi-apologized on Wednesday, but theres a simpler caveat emptor: If you leave a digital trace—post to a social network or for that matter swipe a credit card, carry a smart phone, send an email from the cloud, watch cable television, take the EZ-pass lane or receive government benefits—you are already and inevitably a lab rat. Chances are that one company or organization or another is trying to learn about your economic or social behavior. To take one example, online A/B testing, which delivers different versions of a website to measure reactions, is ubiquitous. The only difference is that Facebook published its results in a peer-reviewed journal and attempted to make its product good for something other than viral listicles and photos of dinner. As for emotional manipulation, guess what, a lot of people are trying to influence your thoughts and feelings all the time. A partial list would include, yes, Silicon Valley technologists, but also advertisers, marketers, politicians, artists of all types, editorialists and every Facebook user ever, not to mention parents, significant others, friends, coworkers and the noisy guy three barstools over. The reality of the information age is that we all have less expectation of privacy, though the upsides may be better interpersonal connection as well as new insights into human endeavors from relationships to retail to epidemiology. But if youre seeking an unmediated social experience, theres an easy solution: Get off Facebook. online.wsj/articles/the-facebook-prison-experiment-1404342903
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 09:02:08 +0000
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