RAPID: Models of Social Contagion of Charitable Sentiment Towards Haiti on Twitter.

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This is a small RAPID award to provide support for a project involving the analysis of the emotional content of large-scale Twitter data to shed light on important and enduring theoretical questions in Social Psychology. The investigators have expertise in Social Informatics and Social Psychology, and together they will collect and analyze a large-scale collection of tweets (short messages broadcast using the Twitter social networking service) that reference the Haiti earthquake disaster. The emotional content of these tweets will be tracked over time in an automated fashion using an expanded version of the Profile of Mood States test previously developed by one of the PIs. The social networks connecting Twitter users will be traced from users' "Friend of" and "Follower" data which will enable the researchers to examine the bi-directional influence of social factors with emotional responses and prosocial behavior. This analysis of Twitter data (both tweet content and social networking data of Follower and Friends networks) will permit an analysis of the impact of emotions on donating or other forms of prosocial behavior, as well as the effect of donating on subsequent emotional states. Using Twitter data to address what represents longstanding theoretical issues in Social Psychology allows the researchers to avoid many of the limitations of laboratory-based studies that include generally short time duration, practical and ethical limitations on the use of high impact manipulations, and often a reliance on college undergraduates as participants. The broader impacts of this work are two-fold. First, the proposed program of research will promote teaching, training, and learning, by training and mentoring undergraduate research assistants and graduate students. Second, the proposed research will address questions that can be applied more broadly, to understand why and how people donate or perform other prosocial behaviors, and to encourage them to do so more frequently. Knowing what emotional states tend to lead to donation, and how people respond to information about their friends or acquaintances donations will allow charitable organizations to construct more effective appeals.