http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?bl
This article talks about sociologists who set out to determine which types of gossip travels the fastest (whether people prefer good news, bad news, etc). The researchers studied a list of the New York Times' most emailed articles "checking it every 15 minutes for more than 6 moths... and controlling for factors like placement in the paper or on the Web Home page."
The main researcher seemed to hypothesize that stories about sex and politics would be among the highest ranked. To his surprise, the stories that were most emailed actually tended to be those emotional in nature, with positive (those that "inspired awe") faring better than those that were negative. Those that are intellectually challenging and lengthy are also more often emailed. There were also a surprisingly high number of scientific articles that made the most emailed list.
I was rather surprised by some of these results at first, but after thinking about the potential reasons behind the results I believe I understand this data better. Or, perhaps I am suffering from hindsight bias. In any case, I think it does make sense that people would want to send positive, awe-inspiring articles to their friends and loved ones because we very much want to increase others' feelings of happiness. Emotion is at the very core of our being. There is such an abundance of negative news presented on television, perhaps emailing positive articles is a way to help offset cable news' generally negative tone.
The researchers made a quick observation about how one might have expected articles consisting of financial advice to be more popular. Their thinking was that if Person A gave person B great advice, then person B would return the favor at a later point in time. Another possible motivation they theorized was that some people might just send articles to "show off" and let others know that they stay well-informed.
I also found it a little surprising that articles a bit longer in length and "intellectually challenging" would be among the most popular. I have always been rather hesitant to send lengthy articles to friends because I worry that saturating them in an abundance of information that they might not even find remotely interesting could just make them mad. It does make sense though, that longer articles would be more likely to contain some type of interesting information in them than short articles. I wonder if social networking sites present a confound problem that creates a bias in favor of long articles - for example, if I read a short, interesting story and want to summarize what it said for my friends, I will often just post it on my facebook status.
The popularity of science articles was a bit baffling at first, but I think it does seem to make sense to me now. I believe people enjoy reading interesting science articles because they help us think in a new and different way. Scientific discoveries help us gain insight and perspective about the true physical and emotional nature of ourselves and our surrounding environment. I think reading about science can evoke feelings of transcendence - there is much we do not know and there is much we will never know, but with each additional step we take in studying the world, we come that much closer to solving the problems we face and that much more connected with the world around us.
I would agree with the comments made here. It is very easy for us to get caught up in the emotionality of a piece over what it actually says most of the time (this seems to be where our issues with relaying more truthful accounts work against us). It’s more interesting to read something that taps into the emotions the writer is experiencing or reveals a scientific truth we were previously unaware of over something that exposes human inadequacies or shortcomings. In a world that is so focused on the negative and the impact the current state of our economy is having on individuals, it comes as no surprise that we want to hear inspirational stories and/or gossip. Thank goodness the Olympics are currently running with their sentimental clips detailing the backgrounds of each athlete before they compete for their country—we are not satisfied with just watching their performance, we want to know what inspired them to be there in the first place! As humans, we are focused on the concept of protagonist and antagonist—there must always be a good and evil. By presenting information in a way that taps into the emotions of the individual, we begin to see the formation of these sometimes biases. To continue with the Olympics example, when we know the history of one athlete (how hard they have worked and how many obstacles they have faced) to appear on our televisions at the most prestigious athletic event in the world—we want them to win! We feel that they deserve to win because our moods have been influenced to the point that we feel a stronger connection to this particular athlete over the others we know very little about.