Does Physiological Arousal Increase Social Transmission of Information? Two Replications of Berger (2011)
重复了Berger（2011）的实验，发现生理唤醒对大学生在社交媒体上分享新闻的意愿没有显著影响，质疑了唤醒促进信息分享的结论。
People share information for many reasons. For example, 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 is widely cited as evidence of the causal role of arousal in sharing information and 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.