Prowten and colleagues failed to replicate the findings of a famous study that reported that as people’s energy levels increase they share more information with others. This has implications for the development of multiple spaces as design can influence mental state. The Prowten lead team shares that “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 . . . 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.”
Skyler Prowten, Emily Walker, Brian London, Elizabeth Pearce, Angela Napoli, Bailey Chenevert, Christian Clevenger, and Andrew Smith. “Does Physiological Arousal Increase Social Transmission of Information? Two Replications of Berger (2011).” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241257255