Facebook Performed A Secret Psychology Experiment On Their Users Without Telling Them

Were you a Facebook’s lab rat? There is 0.04 percent chance you were.

In early 2012 Facebook performed secret psychology test in which they manipulated the posts being seen by nearly 700,000 users to to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages.

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.” – wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal.

The Facebook COO has apologised for the manipulation and said they never meant to upset users with the secret research. But I still think it’s more than a little bit of abuse. And what do you think?

SciShow News explains the science behind this psychological experiment.

SEE ALSO: 5 psychological experiments that reveal our dark side