Professor Doré awarded 2021 SSHRC Insight Grant

Bruce P. Doré, Assistant Professor of Marketing, awarded 2021 SSHRC Insight Grant

“Why do emotions spread quickly through social networks? Mechanisms that underlie the 'viral' spread of emotional content”

Sharing information that evokes emotions in others is an important part of human life. Recently, the rise of online environments has made this behaviour even more pervasive, facilitating the extremely rapid -- or ‘viral’ -- spread of content through social networks. This project combines behavioural, neuroimaging, and field data to better understand the mechanisms that drive emotional content sharing, and how individual decisions accumulate into the spread of emotions throughout a population. To do so, Prof. Doré will clarify empirical connections between content features, social motivations, and market-level behavioural outcomes. In Objectives 1 and 2, he examines processes underlying sharing of news stories and brand messages that evoke positive emotions (e.g., joy, hope) and negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, outrage). In Objective 3, he assesses the efficacy of experimental manipulations that engage these processes. Overall, Prof. Doré hopes to generate theoretical and practical advances relevant to fields and industries concerned with the social and economic consequences of online communications.

Supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

En partie financé par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines.