Donald Trump’s Unstoppable Virality
“Hate, fear of the other, anger — they come directly from the nonconscious, and that’s why they’re so easy to evoke,” Professor Rapson said.
Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, similarly found that news stories were more likely to be shared if they elicited emotions like awe, anger and anxiety.
.. And people with certain political leanings may be more predisposed to sharing. According to Bradley M. Okdie, a social psychologist at Ohio State University at Newark, conservatives are more likely to share a given piece of content than liberals are, especially if it provokes a negative emotion.
“Conservatives tend to be a lot more reactive to negative information and they also tend to be a lot more insular in nature, and they also tend to have less tolerance for ambiguity,” Professor Okdie said. “Conservatives would prefer a negative concrete statement to a slightly positive, uncertain statement.”