How could this misperception have propagated so rapidly? In the Twitter data, Ferrara saw a plausible explanation: “Fear-rich” tweets, he discovered, triggered re-tweets twice as fast, on average, than neutral posts or posts conveying other emotions such as happiness. “Fear was spreading wider and faster than other types of information,” he says.
His findings (yet to be published) confirmed what many social psychologists have long suspected: Fear-induced stress is at the root of mass hysteria. When we hear or read about a threat—that vaccines cause autism, that immigration begets terrorism, or that an explosion at the White House injured Obama—our bodies respond to it as if it were real before our conscious minds can evaluate its truth. And because we feel threatened, we’re more likely to believe that we are, and to share our fears with others.
Fear mongering works, in other words, not because we’re especially gullible or misinformed, but because stress is especially contagious.
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