Does Physiological Arousal Increase Social Transmission of Information? Two Replications of Berger (2011)
Skyler Prowten, Emily Walker, Brian London, Elizabeth Pearce, Angela Napoli, Bailey Chenevert, Christian Clevenger, Andrew R. Smith
Psychological Science · 2024 · Volume 35 · Issue 9
DOI: 10.1177/09567976241257255
Abstract
People share information for many reasons. For example, Berger (2011, N = 40) found that undergraduate participants manipulated to have higher physiological arousal were more likely to share a news article with others via email than people who had low arousal. Berger’s research is widely cited as evidence of the causal role of arousal in sharing information and has been used to explain why information that induces high-arousal emotions is shared more than information that induces low-arousal emotions. We conducted two replications ( N = 111, N = 160) of Berger’s study, using the same arousal manipulation but updating the sharing measure to reflect the rise of information sharing through social media. Both studies failed to find an impact of incidental physiological arousal on undergraduate participants’ willingness to share news articles on social media. Our studies cast doubt on the idea that incidental physiological arousal—in the absence of other factors—impacts people’s decisions to share information on social networking sites.
Keywords
arousal, social transmission, sharing, replication, open data, open materials, preregistered
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.