Today’s social media have enhanced human propensity to embrace fear and hysteria. Recent research by Britain’s University of Warwick Department of Psychology reveals a contagion of panic can occur even in the face of balanced, unbiased information. Here the researchers analyzed 154 participants on social media, dividing them into 14 chains, “with the first person in each chain reading balanced, factual news articles, and writing a message to the next person about the story, the recipient writing a new message for the next person and so on.”
The result?
