Spreading the Good News: Analyzing Socially Shared Inspirational News Content

Abstract

Past research indicates that people often share awe-inspiring news online. However, little is known about the content of those stories. In this study, more broadly defined “inspirational” articles shared through The New York Times website over a 6-month period were analyzed, with the goals of describing the content and identifying characteristics that might predict inspirationality and measures of retransmission. The results provided a snapshot of content found within inspirational news stories; they also revealed that self-transcendent language use predicted the inspirationality of a news story, as well as how long an article appeared on a most shared list.

#Dark inspiration: Eudaimonic entertainment in extremist Instagram posts

“…Eudaimonic elements contributed little to explaining users' likes when all other aspects were controlled for, although references to human connections predicted larger numbers of comments. As such, our findings differ from prior studies on user responses to eudaimonic content which found a preference for sharing "good" news (Ji et al, 2018) and a larger role of positive eudaimonic content in users' general online media diet (Rieger and Klimmt, 2019).…”

“…humans birth and new life or stories about human persistence when overcoming obstacles). Furthermore, we coded for aspects related to the human condition, namely human connection with close others (derived from Ji et al, 2018) and drama or tragedy (see Rieger and Klimmt, 2018).…”

“…After watching meaningful entertainment, recipients report higher intentions for prosocial behavior (Bailey and Wojdynski, 2015; Bartsch et al, 2018) and are motivated to follow the mediums’ example (Oliver et al, 2012). This also includes the motivation to “spread the word”: Inspiring news articles are especially likely to be shared by users (Ji et al, 2018). Recent theorizing has even suggested that self-transcending emotions form a unique type of meaningful media experiences that “consider and promote concepts beyond the self, nature, or the universe” (Oliver et al, 2018: 383).…”

Self-transcendent emotions and social media: Exploring the content and consumers of inspirational Facebook posts

“…Viral videos contained more depictions of hope than non-viral videos, indicating that popularity might be tied to specific self-transcendent depictions. Similarly, Ji et al (2018) found that the presence of inspiration-oriented words predicted how long a newspaper article remained on one of The New York Times “most shared” list. In addition, Berger and Milkman (2012) reported that positive—specifically, “awe inspiring”—content predicted virality among newspaper articles more than negative content.…”

Four best practices for measuring news sentiment using ‘off-the-shelf’ dictionaries: a large-scale p-hacking experiment

“…Some researchers have adopted the tool as a measure of news sentiment (e.g. Ji et al, 2018;Walter, 2019). For our purposes, it is important to note that LIWC is a proprietary software suite with several editions of the bundled dictionaries.…”