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1. Emotion

By October 27, 2008, Denise Grady had been writing about science for The New York Times for more than a decade. With an eye for quirky topics and a deft narrative style, Grady won numerous journalism prizes by making esoteric topics accessible to lay readers.

That day, one of Grady’s articles rocketed up the newspaper’s Most E-Mailed list. Within hours of its publication thousands of people had decided to pass on the article to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. Grady had scored a viral hit.

The topic? How fluid and gas dynamic theories were being used in medical research.

Grady’s article detailed something called schlieren photography, in which “a small, bright light source, precisely placed lenses, a curved mirror, a razor blade that blocks part of the light beam and other tools make it possible to see and photograph disturbances in the air.” Sounds less than riveting, right? Join the club. When we asked people what they thought of this article on a number of different dimensions, the scores were pretty low. Did it have lots of Social Currency? No, they said. Did it contain a lot of practically useful information (something we’ll discuss in the Practical Value chapter)? No again.

In fact, if you’d gone down the checklist of characteristics traditionally believed to be prerequisites for viral content, Grady’s article, entitled “The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film,” would have lacked most of them. Yet Grady’s piece clearly had something special or so many people wouldn’t have hit the e-mail button. What was it?

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Grady’s interest in science started in high school. She was sitting in chemistry class when she read about Robert Millikan’s famous experiment to determine the charge on a single electron. It was a complicated idea and a complicated experiment. The study involved suspending tiny droplets of oil between two metal electrodes, then measuring how strong the electric field had to be in order to stop the droplets from falling.

Grady read it several times. Again and again until she finally understood. But when she did, it was like a flash going off. She got it. It was thrilling. The thinking behind the experiment was so clever, and being able to grasp it was enthralling. She was hooked.

After school Grady went to work at Physics Today magazine. Eventually she worked at Discover and Time magazine and finally worked her way up to health editor at The New York Times. The goal of her articles was always the same: to give people even just a little bit of that excitement that she had felt back in chemistry class decades before. An appreciation for the magic of scientific discovery.

In her piece that October, Grady described how an engineering professor used a photographic technique to capture a visible image of a seemingly invisible phenomenon—a human cough. The schlieren technique had been used for years by aeronautics and military specialists to study how shock waves form around high-speed aircraft. But the engineering professor had harnessed the technique in a new way: to study how airborne infections like tuberculosis, SARS, and influenza spread.

It made sense that most people thought the article wasn’t particularly useful. After all, they weren’t scientists studying fluid dynamics. Nor were they engineers trying to visualize complex phenomena.

And while Grady is one of the best science writers out there, it made sense that the general population would tend to be more interested in articles about sports or fashion. Finally, while coughs would certainly be a nice trigger to remind people of the article, cold and flu season tends to peak around February, four months after the article was released.

Even Grady was bemused. As a journalist, she’s delighted when something she writes goes viral. And like most journalists, or even casual bloggers, she’d love to understand why some of her pieces get widely shared while others don’t.

But while she could make some educated guesses, neither she nor anyone else really knew why one piece of content gets shared more than another. What made this particular article go viral?

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After years of analysis, I’m happy to report that my colleagues and I have some answers. Grady’s 2008 article was part of a multi-year study in which we analyzed thousands of New York Times articles to better understand why certain pieces of online content are widely shared.

A clue comes from the picture that accompanied Grady’s piece. Earlier that October, she had been scanning an issue of The New England Journal of Medicine when she came across a piece entitled “Coughing and Aerosols.” As soon as she saw it she knew the research would be the perfect basis for an article in the Times. Some of the piece was pretty technical, with discussions of infectious aerosols and velocity maps. But above all the jargon was a simple image, an image that made Grady decide to write her article.

Simply put, it was amazing. The reason people shared Grady’s article was emotion. When we care, we share.

MOST E-MAILED LISTS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SHARING

Humans are social animals. As discussed in the chapter on Social Currency, people love to share opinions and information with others. And our tendency to gossip—for good or ill—shapes our relationships with friends and colleagues alike.

The Internet has become increasingly engineered to support these natural inclinations. If people come across a blog post about a new bike sharing program or find a video that helps kids solve tough algebra problems, they can easily hit the Share button or copy and paste the link into an e-mail.

Most major news or entertainment websites take the extra step of documenting what has been passed along most frequently. Listing which articles, videos, and other content have been most viewed or shared over the past day, week, or month.

People often use these lists as shortcuts. There is way too much content available to sift through it all—hundreds of millions of websites and blogs, billions of videos. For news alone, dozens of highly reputable outlets continuously produce new articles.

Few people have time to seek out the best content in this ocean of information. So they start by checking out what others have shared.

As a result, most-shared lists have a powerful ability to shape public discourse. If an article about financial reform happens to make the list, while one about environmental reform barely falls short, that initially small difference in interest can quickly become magnified. As more people see and share the article about financial reform, citizens may become convinced that financial reform deserves more governmental attention than environmental reform, even if the financial issue is mild and the environmental issue severe.

So why does some content make the Most E-Mailed list while other content does not?

For something to go viral, lots of people have to pass along the same piece of content at around the same time. You might have enjoyed Denise Grady’s cough article, and maybe you shared it with a couple of friends. But for the piece to make the Most E-Mailed list, a large number of people had to make the same decision you did.

Is this just random? Or might there be some consistent patterns underlying viral success?

SYSTEMATICALLY ANALYZING THE MOST E-MAILED LIST

The life of a Stanford graduate student is far from grand. My office, if you could call it that, was a high-walled cubicle. It was tucked up in a windowless attic of a 1960s-era building whose architectural style has often been described as “brutalist.” A short, squat structure with concrete walls so thick they could probably withstand a direct hit from a small grenade launcher. Sixty of us were clustered together in a cramped space, and my own ten-by-ten fluorescent-lit box was shared with another student.

The one upside was the elevator. Graduate students were expected to be working at all times of day and night, so the school gave us a keycard that allowed twenty-four-hour access to a special lift. Not only did it take us up to our windowless workstations, it also gave us access to the library, even after it closed. Not the most lavish perk, but a useful one.

Back then the distribution of online content was not as sophisticated as it is today. Content websites now post their most e-mailed lists online, but some newspapers published these lists in their print editions as well. Every day The Wall Street Journal published a list of the five most read articles and the five most e-mailed articles from the previous day’s news. After scanning a couple of these lists, I was enthralled. It seemed like the perfect data source to study why some things get shared more than others.

So just as a stamp collector collects stamps, I began to collect the Journal’s Most Emailed list.

Once every couple of days I would use the special elevator to go hunting. I would take my trusty scissors down to the library late at night, find a stack of the most recent print editions of the Journal, and carefully clip out the Most Emailed lists.

After a few weeks, my collection had grown. I had a big stack of news clippings and was ready to go. I entered the lists in a spreadsheet and began looking for patterns. One day “Dealing with the Dead Zone: Spouses Too Tired to Talk” and “Disney Gowns Are for Big Girls” were two of the most e-mailed articles. A few days later “Is an Economist Qualified to Solve Puzzle of Autism?” and “Why Birdwatchers Now Carry iPods and Laser Pointers” made the list.

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Hmm. On the face of it, these articles had few characteristics in common. What did tired spouses have to do with Disney gowns? And what did Disney have to do with economists studying autism? The connections were not going to be obvious.

Further, reading one or two articles at a time wasn’t going to cut it. To get a handle on things I needed to work faster and more efficiently.

Luckily my colleague Katherine Milkman suggested a vastly improved method. Rather than pull this information from the print newspaper by hand, why not automate the process?

With the help of a computer programmer, we created a Web crawler. Like a never tiring reader, the program automatically scanned The New York Times home page every fifteen minutes, recording what it saw. Not only the text and title of each article, but also who wrote it and where it was featured (posted on the main screen or hidden in a trail of links). It also recorded in which section of the physical paper (health or business, for example) and on what page the article appeared (such as the front page or the back of the third section).

After six months we had a huge data set—every article published by The New York Times over that period. Almost seven thousand articles. Everything from world news and sports to health and technology, as well as which articles made the Most E-Mailed list for those same six months.

Not just what one person shared, but a measure of what all readers, regardless of their age, wealth, or other demographics, were sharing with others.

Now our analysis could begin.

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First, we looked at the general topic of each article. Things like health, sports, education, or politics.

The results showed that education articles were more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list than sports articles. Health pieces were more viral than political ones.

Nice. But we were more interested in understanding what drives sharing than in simply describing the attributes of content that was shared. Okay, so sports articles are less viral than dining articles. But why? It’s like saying people like to share pictures of cats or talk about paintball more than Ping-Pong. That doesn’t really tell us much about why that is happening or allow us to make predictions beyond the narrow domains of cat stuff or sports that start with the letter P.

Two reasons people might share things are that they are interesting and that they are useful. As we discussed in the Social Currency chapter, interesting things are entertaining and reflect positively on the person who shares them. Similarly, as we’ll discuss in the Practical Value chapter, sharing useful information helps others and makes the sharer look good in the process.

To test these theories, we hired a small army of research assistants to score New York Times articles on whether they contained useful information and how interesting they were. Articles about things like how Google uses search data to track the spread of the flu were scored as highly interesting, while an article about the change in the cast of a Broadway play was scored as less interesting. Articles about how to control your credit score were scored as being very useful, while the obituary of an obscure opera singer was scored as not useful. We fed these scores into a statistical analysis program that compared them with the Most E-Mailed lists.

As we expected, both characteristics influenced sharing. More interesting articles were 25 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. More useful articles were 30 percent more likely to make the list.

These results helped explain why health and education articles were highly shared. Articles about these topics are often quite useful. Advice on how to live longer and be happier. Tips for getting the best education for your kids.

But there was still one topic that stood out like a sore thumb: science articles. For the most part, these articles did not have as much Social Currency or Practical Value as articles from more mainstream sections. Yet science articles, like Denise Grady’s piece about the cough, made the Most E-Mailed list more than politics, fashion, or business news. Why?

It turns out that science articles frequently chronicle innovations and discoveries that evoke a particular emotion in readers. That emotion? Awe.

THE POWER OF AWE

Imagine standing on the very edge of the Grand Canyon. The bloodred gorge stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The canyon floor drops precipitously below your feet. You feel dizzy and step back from the edge. Hawks circle through rock crevasses so barren and stripped of vegetation you could as well be on the moon. You are amazed. You are humbled. You feel elevated. This is awe.

According to psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe is the sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might. It’s the experience of confronting something greater than yourself. Awe expands one’s frame of reference and drives self-transcendence. It encompasses admiration and inspiration and can be evoked by everything from great works of art or music to religious transformations, from breathtaking natural landscapes to human feats of daring and discovery.

Awe is a complex emotion and frequently involves a sense of surprise, unexpectedness, or mystery. Indeed, as Albert Einstein himself noted, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.” More than any other emotion, awe described what many readers felt after looking at science pieces from The New York Times. Take “The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film.” The photo of the cough was stunning both as a visual spectacle and as an idea: that something as mundane as a cough could produce this image and yield secrets capable of solving centuries-old medical mysteries.

We decided to test whether awe drove people to share. Our research assistants went back and scored the articles based on how much awe they evoked. Articles about a new treatment for AIDS or a hockey goalie who plays even though he has brain cancer evoked lots of awe. Articles about holiday shopping bargains evoked little or no awe. We then used statistical analyses to compare these scores with whether articles were highly shared.

Our intuition was right: awe boosted sharing.

Awe-inspiring articles were 30 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. Articles previously judged to have low Social Currency and Practical Value—Grady’s cough piece or an article suggesting that gorillas may, like humans, grieve when losing loved ones—nevertheless made the Most E-Mailed list because of the awe they inspired.

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Some of the Web’s most viral videos also evoke awe.

The snickering started as soon as the plump, matronly woman walked onto the stage. She looked more like a lunch lady than a vocalist. First, she was too old to be competing on Britain’s Got Talent. At forty-seven, she was more than twice the age of many of the other contestants.

But, more important, she looked, well, frumpy. The other competitors were already dressed to be the next big thing. Sexy, ruggedly handsome, or hip. They wore form-fitting dresses, tailored vests, and summer scarves. But this woman looked more like an example of what not to wear. Her outfit looked like a cross between an old set of drapes and a secondhand Easter dress.

And she was nervous. When the judges started asking her questions she got stuck and stumbled on her words. “What’s the dream?” they inquired. When she replied that she wanted to be a professional singer you could just see the thoughts going through their heads. That’s rich! You? A professional singer? The cameras zoomed in on members of the audience laughing and rolling their eyes. Even the judges smirked. They clearly wanted her to get off the stage as soon as possible. All signs pointed to her giving a terrible performance and being booted from the show, pronto.

But just as it seemed that it couldn’t get any worse, she started singing.

And time stopped.

It was breathtaking.

As the opening chords from “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables wafted over the speakers, Susan Boyle’s exquisite voice shone through like a beacon. So powerful, so beautiful that it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The judges were awed, the audience screamed, and everyone broke out into wild applause. Some started tearing up as they listened. The performance left people speechless.

Susan Boyle’s first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent is one of the most viral videos ever. In just nine short days, the clip accumulated more than 100 million views.

It’s hard to watch this video and not be awed by her strength and heart. It’s not only moving, it’s awe-inspiring. And that emotion drove people to pass it on.

DOES ANY EMOTION BOOST SHARING?

Our initial New York Times findings brought up other questions. What about awe makes people share? Might other emotions have the same effect?

There are reasons to believe that experiencing any sort of emotion might encourage people to share. Talking to others often makes emotional experiences better. If we get promoted, telling others helps us celebrate. If we get fired, telling others helps us vent.

Sharing emotions also helps us connect. Say I watch a really awe-inspiring video, like Susan Boyle’s performance. If I share that video with a friend, he’s likely to feel similarly inspired. And the fact that we both feel the same way helps deepen our social connection. It highlights our similarities and reminds us how much we have in common. Emotion sharing is thus a bit like social glue, maintaining and strengthening relationships. Even if we’re not in the same place, the fact that we both feel the same way bonds us together.

But these benefits of sharing emotion don’t just arise from awe alone. They happen for all sorts of emotions.

If you send a coworker a joke that cracks both of you up, it underscores your connection. If you send your cousin an op-ed piece that makes you both angry, it strengthens the fact that you share the same views.

So would any type of emotional content be more likely to be shared?

To answer this, we picked another emotion, sadness, and dove back into the data. We asked our research assistants to score each article based on how much sadness it evoked. Articles about things like someone paying tribute to his deceased grandmother were scored as evoking a good deal of sadness, while articles about things like a winning golfer were scored as low sadness. If any emotion boosted sharing, then sadness—like awe—should also increase sharing.

But it didn’t. In fact, sadness had the opposite effect. Sadder articles were actually 16 percent less likely to make the Most E-Mailed list. Something about sadness was making people less likely to share. What?

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The most obvious difference between different emotions is their pleasantness or positivity. Awe is relatively pleasant, while sadness is unpleasant. Might positive emotions increase sharing, but negative emotions decrease it?

People have long speculated about how positive and negative emotions influence what people talk about and share. Conventional wisdom suggests that negative content should be more viral. Consider the old news adage “If it bleeds, it leads.” This phrase is based on the notion that bad news generates more attention and interest than good news. That’s why the nightly news always starts with something like: “The hidden health hazard that’s lurking in your basement. Find out more, next, on the six o’clock news.” Editors and producers believe that negative stories will help draw, and keep, viewers’ attention.

That said, you could also make a case for the opposite: that people prefer sharing good news. After all, don’t most of us want to make others feel happy or positive rather than anxious or sad? Similarly, as we discussed in the chapter on Social Currency, whether people share something often depends on how it makes them look to others. Positive things may be shared more because they reflect positively on the person doing the sharing. After all, no one wants to be Debbie Downer, always sharing things that are sad and gloomy.

So which is it? Is positive information more likely to be shared than negative, or vice versa?

We went back to our database and measured the positivity of each article. This time we used a textual analysis program developed by psychologist Jamie Pennebaker. The program quantifies the amount of positivity and negativity in a passage of text by counting the number of times hundreds of different emotional words appear. The sentence “I loved the card; that was so nice of her,” for example, is relatively positive because it contains positive words like “love” and “nice.” The sentence “That was so nasty of her; it really hurt my feelings,” on the other hand, is relatively negative because of negative words like “hurt” and “nasty.” We scored each article based on its positivity or negativity and then examined how that related to whether it made the Most E-Mailed list.

The answer was definitive: positive articles were more likely to be highly shared than negative ones. Stories about things like newcomers falling in love with New York City were, on average, 13 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list than pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular zookeeper.

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Finally we were feeling confident that we understood how emotion shapes transmission. It seemed like people share positive things and avoid sharing negative ones.

But just to be sure that we were correct that negative emotions decrease sharing, we gave our research assistants one final task. We asked them to score each article on two other major negative emotions: anger and anxiety.

Articles about things like Wall Street fat cats getting hefty bonuses during the economic downturn induced lots of anger, while articles about topics like summer T-shirts evoked no anger at all. Articles about things like the stock market tanking made people pretty anxious, while articles about things like Emmy Award nominees evoked no anxiety. If it were true that people share positive content and avoid sharing negative content, then anger and anxiety should, like sadness, reduce sharing.

But this wasn’t the case. In fact, it was the opposite. Articles that evoked anger or anxiety were more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.

Now we were really confused. Clearly, something more complicated than whether an article was positive or negative determined how widely things were shared. But what?

KINDLING THE FIRE: THE SCIENCE OF PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL

The idea that emotions can be categorized as positive or pleasant and negative or unpleasant has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Even a child can tell you that happiness or excitement feels good and anxiety or sadness feels bad.

More recently, however, psychologists have argued that emotions can also be classified based on a second dimension. That of activation, or physiological arousal.

What is physiological arousal? Think about the last time you gave a speech in front of a large audience. Or when your team was on the verge of winning a huge game. Your pulse raced, your palms sweated, and you could feel your heart pounding in your chest. You may have had similar feelings the last time you saw a scary movie or went camping and heard a weird noise outside your tent. Though your head kept saying you weren’t really in danger, your body was convinced otherwise. Every sense was heightened. Your muscles were tensed and you were alert to every sound, smell, and movement. This is arousal.

Arousal is a state of activation and readiness for action. The heart beats faster and blood pressure rises. Evolutionarily, it comes from our ancestors’ reptilian brains. Physiological arousal motivates a fight-or-flight response that helps organisms catch food or flee from predators.

We no longer have to chase our dinner or worry about being eaten, but the activation arousal provides still facilitates a host of everyday actions. When aroused we do things. We wring our hands and pace back and forth. We pump our fists in the air and run around the living room. Arousal kindles the fire.

Some emotions, like anger and anxiety, are high-arousal. When we’re angry we yell at customer service representatives. When we’re anxious we check and recheck things. Positive emotions also generate arousal. Take excitement. When we feel excited we want to do something rather than sit still. The same is true for awe. When inspired by awe we can’t help wanting to tell people what happened.

Other emotions, however, have the opposite effect: they stifle action.

Take sadness. Whether dealing with a tough breakup or the death of a beloved pet, sad people tend to power down. They put on some cozy clothes, curl up on the couch, and eat a bowl of ice cream. Contentment also deactivates. When people are content, they relax. Their heart rates slow, and their blood pressure decreases. They’re happy, but they don’t particularly feel like doing anything. Think of how you feel after a long hot shower or a relaxing massage. You’re more likely to relax and sit still than leap into another activity.

HIGH AROUSAL

LOW AROUSAL

POSITIVE

Awe

Excitement

Amusement (Humor)

Contentment

NEGATIVE

Anger

Anxiety

Sadness

Once we realized the important role that emotional arousal might play, we returned to our data. Just to recap, so far we had found that awe increased sharing and that sadness decreased it. But rather than finding a simple matter of positive emotions increasing sharing and negative emotions decreasing it, we found that some negative emotions, like anger or anxiety, actually increased sharing. Would physiological arousal be the key to the puzzle?

It was.

Understanding arousal helps integrate the different results we had found so far. Anger and anxiety lead people to share because, like awe, they are high-arousal emotions. They kindle the fire, activate people, and drive them to take action.

Arousal is also one reason funny things get shared. Videos about the aftereffects of a kid having anesthesia at the dentist (“David After Dentist”), a baby biting his brother’s finger (“Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!”), or a unicorn going to Candy Mountain and getting his kidney stolen (“Charlie the Unicorn”) are some of the most popular on YouTube. Taken together they have been viewed more than 600 million times.

But while it is tempting to say that these things went viral simply because they are funny, a more fundamental process is at work. Think about the last time you heard a really hilarious joke or were forwarded a humorous clip and felt compelled to pass it along. Just like inspiring things, or those that make us angry, funny content is shared because amusement is a high-arousal emotion.

Low-arousal emotions, however, like sadness, decrease sharing. Contentment has the same effect. Contentment isn’t a bad feeling. Being content feels pretty good. But people are less likely to talk about or share things that make them content because contentment decreases arousal.

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United Airlines learned the hard way that arousal can drive people to share. Dave Carroll was a pretty good musician. His group, Sons of Maxwell, wasn’t a blockbuster act, but they made enough money from album sales, touring, and merchandising to pull together a decent living. People weren’t tattooing Dave’s name on their arms, but he was doing all right.

While traveling to a gig in Nebraska, Dave and his band had to take a connecting flight through Chicago with United Airlines. It’s hard enough to find overhead space for even a small carry-on, but musicians have it even tougher. Dave’s group couldn’t fit their guitars in the overhead, so they had to check them with the rest of their baggage.

But as they were about to deplane at O’Hare Airport, a woman cried out, “My god, they’re throwing guitars out there!” Dave looked out the window in horror just in time to see the baggage handlers roughly tossing his treasured instruments through the air.

He jumped up and pleaded with the flight attendant for help, but to no avail. One flight attendant told him to talk to the lead agent, but that agent said it wasn’t her responsibility. Another employee gave him the run-around and told him to take up the matter with the gate agent when he landed in his final destination.

When Dave landed in Omaha at 12:30 a.m., he found the airport deserted. No employees in sight.

Dave made his way to baggage claim and carefully opened his guitar case. His worst fears were confirmed. His $3,500 guitar had been smashed.

But that was only the start of Dave’s story. He spent the next nine months negotiating with United for some kind of compensation. He filed a claim asking United to fix the guitar, but it denied his request. Among a long list of justifications, United argued that it couldn’t help him because he had missed the brief twenty-four-hour window for claiming damages described in the small print of his ticket.

Furious with the way he’d been treated, Dave channeled his emotions the way any good musician would: he wrote a song about it. He described his experience, put it to music, and posted it as a short clip on YouTube entitled “United Breaks Guitars.” Within twenty-four hours of uploading the video, he’d received almost 500 comments, most of them from other angry United customers who’d had similar experiences. In less than four days the video had more than 1.3 million views. Within ten days, more than 3 million views and 14,000 comments. In December 2009, Time magazine listed “United Breaks Guitars” as one of the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2009.

United appears to have felt the negative effects almost immediately. Within four days of the video being posted, its stock price fell 10 percent—the equivalent of $180 million. Although United eventually donated $3,000 to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz as a “gesture of goodwill,” many industry observers felt that it suffered permanent damage as a result of the incident.

FOCUS ON FEELINGS

Marketing messages tend to focus on information. Public health officials note how much healthier teens will be if they don’t smoke or if they eat more vegetables. People think that if they just lay out the facts in a clear and concise way, it will tip the scales. Their audience will pay attention, weigh the information, and act accordingly.

But many times information is not enough. Most teens don’t smoke because they think it’s good for them. And most people who scarf down a Big Mac and large fries and wash it down with a supersized Coke are not oblivious to the health risks. So additional information probably won’t get them to change their behavior. They need something more.

And that is where emotion comes in. Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that motivate people to action.

Some products or ideas may seem better suited than others for evoking emotion. It seems easier to get people excited about a new, hip lounge than logistics management. Pets and babies seem to lend themselves to emotional appeals more than banking or nonprofit financial strategy does.

But any product or service can focus on feelings, even those that don’t possess any obvious emotional hook.

Take online search engines. Search engines seem like one of the least emotional products you can think of. People want the most accurate search results in the least time possible. And underneath those results is a tangle of confusing technology: link weighting, indexing, and PageRank algorithms. A difficult product to get people fired up or teary eyed about, right?

Well, Google did exactly that with its “Parisian Love” campaign.

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When Anthony Cafaro graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2009, he wasn’t expecting to become a Googler. No one from Visual Arts had gone to work for Google before, and the company was known as a place for techies, not designers. But when Cafaro learned Google was interviewing graphic-design graduates, he thought he’d give it a shot.

The interview was a blast. By the end, the interviewers seemed less like examiners and more like old friends. Cafaro turned down a slew of offers from traditional ad agencies to join a newly formed Google design team called the Creative Lab.

After a few months, though, Anthony realized that the Creative Lab’s approach wasn’t exactly in line with the company’s overall ethos. Great graphic design is visceral. Like art, it moves people and evokes their innermost feelings. But Google was about analytics, not emotion.

In a telling story, a designer once suggested using a certain shade of blue for the toolbar based on its visual appeal. But the product manager resisted using the color, asking the designer to justify that choice with quantitative research. At Google, colors aren’t just colors, they’re mathematical decisions.

The same issues came up in one of Cafaro’s first projects. The Creative Lab was asked to create content to highlight the functionality of Google’s new search interface. Features like finding flights, autocorrect, and language translation. One potential solution was a little tutorial on how to search better. A how-to of the different functions. Another was “A Google a Day,” an online trivia game that involved using search features to solve complex puzzles.

Cafaro liked both ideas but felt something was missing. Emotion.

Google had a great interface and useful search results, but an interface doesn’t make you laugh. An interface doesn’t make you cry. A demo would show how the interface worked, but that would be it. Cafaro wanted to humanize the interface. He wanted not only to show features, but to move people. Build an emotional connection.

So together with the Creative Lab team, Cafaro developed a video entitled “Parisian Love.” The clip tells a budding love story, using Google searches that evolve over time. No images of people, or even voices—just the phrases entered in the search bar and the results that emerge.

It starts when a guy enters “study abroad Paris France” and clicks on one of the top search results to learn more. Later he searches for “cafés near the Louvre,” and scans to find one he thinks he’ll like. You hear a female laugh in the background as his next entry is “translate tu es très mignon,” which he soon learns is French for “you are very cute.” Quickly he then seeks advice on how to “impress a French girl,” reads up on the suggestions, and searches for chocolate shops in Paris.

The music builds as the plot unfolds. We follow the searcher as he transitions from seeking long-distance relationship advice to job hunting in Paris. We see him tracking a plane’s landing time and then searching for Paris churches (to the accompaniment of church bells in the background). Finally, as the music crescendos, we see him asking how to assemble a crib. The video ends with a simple message. “Search on.” You cannot watch this clip without having your heartstrings tugged. It’s romantic, joyous, and inspiring all at once. I still feel tingles every time I see it, and I’ve watched it dozens of times.

When the Creative Lab presented the clip to the Google Search marketing team, everyone loved it. Google’s CEO’s wife loved it. Everyone wanted to pass it on. In fact, the clip did so well internally that Google decided to release it to the larger public. By focusing on feelings, Google turned a normal ad into a viral hit.

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It doesn’t require a costly ad agency or millions of dollars in focus groups to get people to feel emotion. Cafaro created the clip with four other students who had been brought in from design programs across the country. Rather than simply highlighting the latest gee-whiz feature, Cafaro’s team reminded people what they love about Google Search. As one Creative Lab team member put it, “The best results don’t show up in a search engine, they show up in people’s lives.” Well said.

In their wonderful book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about using the “Three Whys” to find the emotional core of an idea. Write down why you think people are doing something. Then ask “Why is this important?” three times. Each time you do this, note your answer, and you’ll notice that you drill down further and further toward uncovering not only the core of an idea, but the emotion behind it.

Take online search. Why is search important? Because people want to find information quickly.

Why do they want to do that? So they can get answers to what they are looking for.

Why do they want those answers? So they can connect with people, achieve their goals, and fulfill their dreams. Now that’s starting to get more emotional.

Want people to talk about global warming and rally to change it? Don’t just point out how big the problem is or list key statistics. Figure out how to make them care. Talk about polar bears dying or how their children’s health will be affected.

KINDLING THE FIRE WITH HIGH-AROUSAL EMOTIONS

When trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire: select high-arousal emotions that drive people to action.

On the positive side, excite people or inspire them by showing them how they can make a difference. On the negative side, make people mad, not sad. Make sure the polar bear story gets them fired up.

Simply adding more arousal to a story or ad can have a big impact on people’s willingness to share it. In one experiment we changed the details of a story to make it evoke more anger. In another experiment, we made an ad funnier.

In both cases, the results were the same. More anger or more humor led to more sharing. Adding these emotions boosted transmission by boosting the amount of arousal the story or ad evoked.

Negative emotions can also drive people to talk and share. Marketing messages usually try to paint products and ideas in the most positive light possible. From razors to refrigerators, ads typically show smiling customers who extol the benefits they derive from using the product. Marketers tend to avoid negative emotions out of fear they could taint the brand.

But if used correctly, negative emotions can actually boost word of mouth.

BMW kindled the fire beautifully in a 2001 campaign. The German automobile company created a series of short Internet films entitled The Hire. Rather than being typical feel-good commercials showing BMWs driving down various idyllic country roads, the movies were riddled with kidnappings, FBI raids, and near-death experiences. While the fear and anxiety they evoked were far from positive, the clips so highly aroused viewers that the series racked up more than 11 million views within four months. Over the same period, BMW sales increased 12 percent.

Or consider public health messages. It’s often hard to put a positive spin on things when you’re trying to get people to realize that smoking causes lung cancer, or that obesity reduces life expectancy by more than three years. But certain types of negative emotional appeals should be more effective in getting people to spread the word than others.

Think back to the “Man Drinks Fat” public service announcement we talked about in the Triggers chapter. A huge glob of white fat plopping down on a plate? Gross! But because disgust is a highly arousing emotion, it encouraged people to talk about and share the PSA. Designing messages that make people anxious or disgusted (high arousal) rather than sad (low arousal) will boost transmission. Negative emotions, when used correctly, can be a powerful driver of discussion.

And that brings us to babywearing.

BABYWEARING, BOYCOTTS, AND BLUNTING BAD BUZZ

The year 2008 had many firsts. The first time China hosted the Olympics, the first African American elected president of the United States, and one that you might not have been aware of. The inaugural celebration of International Babywearing Week.

The practice of carrying your baby in a sling or similar carrier has been around for thousands of years. Some experts have even argued that the practice strengthens the maternal bond, improving the health of the baby and the mother. But as strollers and other gadgets have been popularized, many parents have moved away from this practice. So in 2008, a celebration was held to raise awareness and encourage people around the world to reconsider the benefits of babywearing.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the maker of painkiller Motrin, saw this swell of interest as a perfect opportunity. Motrin’s motto at the time was “We feel your pain.” So in an attempt to show solidarity with mothers, the company created an ad centered on the aches and pains mothers can suffer from carrying their babies in slings. The ad noted that while babywearing can be great for the baby, it can put a ton of strain on the back, neck, and shoulders of the mom.

The company was trying to be supportive. It wanted to show that it understood mom’s pain and Motrin was there to help. But a number of so-called mommy bloggers saw things differently. The mom’s voice-over in the ad said babywearing “totally makes me look like an official mom. And so if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.” Deeply offended on two fronts—by the implication that they wore their babies as fashion statements and that they looked crazy—mothers took to their blogs and Twitter accounts. The anger spread.

Soon thousands of people were involved. “A baby will never be a fashion statement. How outrageous is that thinking!” one cried. The posts multiplied. Many of the writers said they would boycott the company. The topic started to trend on Twitter, and the movement got picked up by The New York Times, Ad Age, and a host of other media outlets. Soon seven out of the top ten searches for “Motrin” and “headache” on Google referred to the marketing debacle.

Finally, after too long a delay, Motrin took the advertisement down from its website and issued a lengthy apology.

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Technology has made it easier for people to organize behind a common interest or goal. By allowing people to connect quickly and easily, social media enable like-minded individuals to find one another, share information, and coordinate plans of action.

These technologies are particularly useful when people either live far apart or are dealing with an issue that has delicate political or social meaning. Many people point to social media as the catalyst behind the Arab Spring, the wave of antigovernment protests that broke out across the Arab world, eventually toppling the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, among others.

Some of these burgeoning social movements are positive. Enabling citizens to rise up against dictatorships or helping teens facing harassment to realize that life gets better.

But in other cases the comments and movements are negative in nature. False rumors may start to gain traction. Vicious gossip may circulate and build. Is it possible to predict which flare-ups will remain isolated comments and which will snowball?

Part of the answer comes back to physiological arousal. Certain types of negativity may be more likely to escalate because they evoke arousal and are thus more likely to go viral. Angry tirades about bad customer service, or anxious rumors about how a new health plan may take away benefits, should be more likely to circulate than expressions of sadness or disappointment.

So teachers and principals should be particularly wary of hurtful rumors that carry an arousing punch because they are more likely to get passed around. Similarly, Motrin’s maker could have stemmed the boycott before it started by monitoring online chatter. By looking for words like “pissed off,” “angry,” or “mad” in people’s posts, tweets, or status updates the company could have addressed unsatisfied customers before the anger built. Fixing these high-arousal emotions early can mitigate the negativity before it snowballs.

EXERCISE MAKES PEOPLE SHARE

Our emotional odyssey has one last stop.

At Wharton, we have a behavioral lab where people are paid to do various psychology and marketing experiments. These tasks often involve clicking boxes in an online survey or circling items on a sheet of paper.

But when people came in for an experiment of mine one November a few years ago, the instructions were a bit more unusual.

Half the participants were asked to sit still in their chairs for sixty seconds and relax. Easy enough.

The other half, however, were asked to jog lightly in place for a minute. Regardless of whether they were wearing sneakers or pumps, jeans or slacks, they were asked to run in place for sixty seconds in the middle of the laboratory.

Okay. Sure. I guess. Some participants gave us a puzzled look when we made the request, but all complied.

After they were done, they participated in what seemed like a second, unrelated experiment. They were told the experimenters were interested in what people share with others and were given a recent article from the school newspaper. Then, after reading it, they were given the option of e-mailing it to anyone they liked.

In actuality, this “unrelated study” was part of my initial experiment. I wanted to test a simple but intriguing hypothesis. At this point we knew that emotionally arousing content or experiences would be more likely to be shared. But I wondered whether the effects of arousal might be even broader than that. If arousal induces sharing, then might any physiologically arousing experience drive people to share stories and information with others?

Running in place provided the perfect test. Running doesn’t evoke emotion, but it is just as physiologically arousing. It gets your heart rate up, increases blood pressure, etc. So if arousal of any sort boosts sharing, then running in place should lead people to share things with others. Even if the things people are talking about or sharing have nothing to do with the reason they are experiencing arousal.

And it did. Among students who had been instructed to jog, 75 percent shared the article—more than twice as many as the students who had been in the “relaxed” group. Thus any sort of arousal, whether from emotional or physical sources, and even arousal due to the situation itself (rather than content), can boost transmission.

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Understanding that arousing situations can drive people to pass things on helps shed light on so-called oversharing, when people disclose more than they should. Ever been stuck next to someone on a plane who won’t stop sharing what seem like extremely personal details? Or find yourself in a conversation where later on you realize that you may have shared way more than you meant to? Why does this happen?

Sure, we may feel more comfortable with someone than we thought we would or we may have had one too many margaritas. But there is also a third reason. If situational factors end up making us physiologically aroused, we may end up sharing more than we planned.

So be careful the next time you step off the treadmill, barely avoid a car accident, or experience a turbulent plane ride. Because you’ve been aroused by these experiences, you may overshare information with others in the aftermath.

These ideas also suggest that one way to generate word of mouth is to find people when they are already fired up. Exciting game shows like Deal or No Deal or anxiety-inducing crime dramas like CSI are more likely to get people aroused than documentaries about historical figures. These shows should get more chatter themselves, sure, but the boosted heart rate they induce should also spill over and make people more likely to talk about the commercials that appear during the break. Ads at the gym may provoke lots of discussion simply because people are already so amped. Work groups may benefit from taking walks together because it will encourage people to share their ideas and opinions.

The same idea holds for online content. Certain websites, news articles, or YouTube videos evoke more arousal than others. Blogs about financial markets, articles about political cronyism, and hilarious videos are all likely to boost activation, which, in turn, should increase the transmission of ads or other content that appears on those pages.

Ad timing also matters. Although a show may be generally arousing, a specific scene in that show may be more activating than others. In crime shows, for example, the anxiety often peaks somewhere in the middle. When the crime is solved at the end, all tension dissipates. In game shows, excitement—and therefore arousal—is highest when contestants are about to find out how much they’ve won. We may end up talking more about ads that show up close to these exciting moments.

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Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy. So rather than quoting statistics or providing information, we need to focus on feelings. As Anthony Cafaro, the designer who helped develop the “Parisian Love” video at Google, noted: Whether it’s a digital product, like Google, or a physical product, like sneakers, you should make something that will move people. People don’t want to feel like they’re being told something—they want to be entertained, they want to be moved.

Some emotions kindle the fire more than others. As we discussed, activating emotion is the key to transmission. Physiological arousal or activation drives people to talk and share. We need to get people excited or make them laugh. We need to make them angry rather than sad. Even situations where people are active can make them more likely to pass things on to others.

Fluid dynamics and online search seem like two of the least moving topics out there. But by relating these abstract topics to people’s own lives and evoking underlying emotion, Denise Grady and Anthony Cafaro got us to care, and share.