Headlines with a negative twist boost the consumption of online news, demonstrates study
Mar 2023, phys.org
This isn't about misinformation or memetic propagation; it's about multiple discovery, which I would rather call simultaneous discovery -- Calculus and the telephone come to mind.
Incidentally, the publication of the research is a story all by itself. Only when Feuerriegel and his team submitted an initial version of the paper to Nature Human Behaviour did they become aware that a research group led by Jay Van Bavel from New York University had also submitted a paper -- in the same week, on the same topic, based on the same dataset from Upworthy.com, and with almost identical results.
via Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich: Claire E. Robertson et al, Negativity drives online news consumption, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4
Post Script:
This whole description is poorly sourced but well written: The concept of multiple discovery (also known as simultaneous invention) is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors. The concept of multiple discovery opposes a traditional view—the "heroic theory" of invention and discovery. Multiple discovery is analogous to convergent evolution in biological evolution.
Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.
-Merton, Robert K. (December 1963). "Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science". European Journal of Sociology. 4 (2): 237–282. doi:10.1017/S0003975600000801. JSTOR 23998345. S2CID 145650007. Reprinted in: Robert K. Merton (15 September 1996). On Social Structure and Science. University of Chicago Press. pp. 305–. ISBN 978-0-226-52070-4.
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