对媒体而言，坏消息能卖出好价钱。如有流血事件，还可上头条。“没消息”是好事，但这样的好事就没新闻了。那些是晚间广播和早报的经典常规。但是现今信息以不同的方式传播和被监控，研究人员们正发掘新的常规。通过跟踪人们的电邮和网络帖子，科学家们发现，好消息可以比灾难性和悲惨的故事传播得更快更远。一位宾夕法尼亚大学学者Jonah Berger博士：「如果“流血事件可登头条”这常规适用于大众媒体，是因为他们只想抓人眼球，不关心人们的感受。但是当你和朋友分享一个故事时，你会更关心他们会怎样反应，因为你不希望他们把你看作是Debbie Downer（一个妄顾他人感受的人）。」研究人员对各类型的口碑传播（包括电邮、网络帖子及评论，以及面对面谈）作分析，他们发现，传播广泛的信息内容更倾向积极多于消极，虽然这并不意味着人们更喜爱传递正能量的信息。难道就光是因为人们的经历乐多于苦，故此好消息分享来得更频繁？为著测试这可能性，Berger博士观察了人们如何传播一组特定的新闻。在“纽约时报”网站上的有数千篇文章。他和一位宾夕法尼亚大学的同事对六个月内“转发得最多的电邮”排行榜作分析。其中一项发现，科学类的文章比其他非科学文章更有可能上榜。他发现，科学信息令“纽约时报”的读者感到惊奇，亦促使他们想与其他人分享这种正面的感受。读者亦倾向于与人分享令人感到兴奋或有趣的文章，或者那些能激发负面情绪（例如愤怒或焦虑）的，而不是那些只令人感到伤感的文章。人们需要激化情绪，并且偏爱于好消息。正如Berger博士在他的新书《传染：为什么会流行起来》中解释说，越积极的文章就越有可能被分享。~~~~~~纯人手翻译，欢迎采纳~~~~~~原文不全，全文如下：Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people’s e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media,” says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed Times’ readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others. Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”
蛋的故事
