Much has been claimed of Twitter – from the most “popular” word in the world to the scourge of society. Scientifically, Twitter must also take at least 12.47% of the blame for Justin Bieber and over 9000 really bad jokes about people tweeting what they ate for lunch. But the one thing that’s definitely true is that microblogging is “social” media and is about connecting to other people, right? Possibly not. In a throwback to Stanley Milgram’s gloriously misanthropic experiments of the 1960s, a bunch of sadists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore deliberately caused a group of subjects to become “socially anxious” by getting them to play an online game where players pass the ball to each other, but deliberately never passing the ball to the subject. This had no effect on the subjects’ tweeting. However, when they instead made the subjects “existentially nervous” by getting them to think about death that led to a marked increase in tweets. So social media might be better named “narcissistic media”? The 40% drop in US college students’ empathy scores over the last 30 years would certainly bear this out.

Thanks to Samuel Payne.

Image Credit:
SDSmith blog

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