A new book explores why people share some things more than others.
Why do some things "go viral" while others fall flat? In his new book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, explores the science of popularity in an age of social media.
Q: Great title. So why DO things catch on?
A: You might think it's about advertising. You might think it's about having a better product or a higher quality product or you might think it's luck. What the book is all about is how word of mouth and social influence more generally drive people to talk about and share things and drive those things to become popular. Marketers could definitely use these tools. But this book is really a psychology book and a sociology book. It's about understanding why people talk and share. You could think about it as understanding conversations -- the science of what we talk about.
Q: How has social media changed this concept?
A: Social media definitely quickened the pace of information diffusion. You used to have to share with one person who shared it with someone else. Now with the click of a button, you can share with a thousand -- five thousand, ten thousand -- others.
Q: Yet you say that just 7% of word of mouth happens online? How is that?
A: We tend to focus a lot on online behavior -- in part because it's easy to see -- but we should remember that lots of social transmission actually happens offline as well. We have breakfast with our family. We see our colleagues at work. We go out to lunch. We have meetings. We're not talking online. We're talking offline face-to-face. While there may be no permanent record of these conversations, they still make up a big part of daily life and have a big impact on our behavior.
Q: You talk about certain emotions that may boost sharing. Which ones do that?
A: We found that any emotion causes people to share. Positive things get shared a little more than negative but more important is if it's an activating emotion. Think about the difference between anger and sadness. Both of those are negative emotions. But think about what you do when you're angry compared to what you do when you're sad. When you're angry, you want to do something and take action. You want to throw something or yell at someone. But when you're sad, you want to curl up in a ball or watch your favorite movie or eat a bowl of ice cream. Excitement is an activating emotion. Contentment is a de-activating emotion. It's not just whether it makes people feel positive or negative but whether it activates them or not.
Q: You mention examples in the book, such as why Susan Boyle's appearance on Britain's Got Talent became one of the most viral videos ever. Can you explain why?
A: Susan Boyle is a great example of high-arousal emotion. That video is extremely inspiring. It is not only remarkable that she's such a good singer, it's surprising. It's awe-inspiring. What our work shows is that high-arousal emotions increase sharing and low-arousal emotions decrease sharing. When you're excited, you are fired up and activated. When you're content, you feel relaxed but don't want to do very much. High-arousal emotion drives sharing.
Q: In your book, you discuss the psychology of discounts. That's another idea that appeals to most of us. Why is it important that humans get a good deal?
A: If something is on a discount and it seems like a big discount, we assume that it's a lucky situation. Whereas, if something is regular price, even if that regular price is low, we don't necessarily see it as opportunity. In the book, we talk about the rule of 100. Imagine a $20 T-shirt and imagine you could have a $5 discount or 25% discount. They're equivalent in terms of how much money off that is. Yet consumers see that and they would say that the 25% off seems like better deal. If you offered 25% off of that T-shirt, more people would take you up on it. But it's not that percentage discounts are always better. If you take a $2,000 laptop and you have a 25% off deal or equivalently $500 off, in that discount people would say that the money — the $500 off — seems like a better deal. The same discount seems bigger when it's represented as a percentage if it's less than $100, but as dollars when it's above $100.
Q: You identify six elements you say drive things to become contagious. One of them is Public — when things are more observable, it makes them easier to imitate, which also makes them more likely to be popular. Talk about Gangnam Style, the Korean pop song and distinctive dance that went viral last year.
A: One thing that really helped make that video popular was there was a public dance to go along with it. Thinking about public signals of private behavior, how does someone know if you like a particular song? It's hard to tell unless they see you listening to it. But what this dance did is it made it more public that people liked that particular music and it was a public signal people adopted even if they weren't listening to the song. Doing that move was a way to communicate they're in the know, but along the way, they're sharing information about the song. They're acting as an advertisement for the song.