mass emotional contagion at scale

Summary of Joe Rogan at https://t.co/WmnbSEPWdv

“What I got interested in, in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing—it creates states of emotional contagion that aren’t really about convincing people of a different way to think,” she explained. She continued: “But more about how you feel about what you think.” That emotional shift, she added, is straight out of the cult playbook. “It’s not that it changed my thoughts,” she said. “It’s how I felt about those thoughts.”

If your feed in January 2012 felt unusually bleak or suspiciously upbeat, you may have unknowingly been part of the study.

The team behind it, led by data scientist Adam Kramer, published their findings in a scientific journal and laid out the results in cold detail:

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,” the paper said.

It was hard proof that emotions are contagious—and social media could be weaponized to control mood at scale.

https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1923136944776634372

The Vigilant Fox 

@VigilantFox

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it actually happened. And it should terrify everyone. Joe Rogan’s guest just exposed one of the most sinister psychological experiments ever unleashed by Big Tech—and there's a good chance that you were part of it. What Facebook conducted nearly 13 years ago makes government censorship look tame by comparison. THREAD

Joe Rogan’s conversation with Harvard professor and mind control expert Rebecca Lemov quickly zeroed in on one of his favorite topics: government interference in digital life. Rogan opened the door with a warning that’s become all too familiar. “Well, there’s so many different kinds of mind control.” He continued: “You know, one of the things we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is, that an enormous percentage of what you’re seeing on social media in terms of interactions and debate is not real. It’s not organic.” “It’s state run and state funded, and it’s whether it’s foreign governments or our government or even corporations, you’re getting inorganic discourse that’s designed to form a narrative and which is a form of mind control.” Lemov jumped in and took it one step further—explaining that even when we know it’s fake, our minds still react like it’s real. “Yeah. I mean, I think even on a basic level, people, it’s known and studies have shown that we respond as if it were organic and real.” “Even when somebody likes a post of yours, the response is the same as, like, in-person interaction.” It’s not just governments pulling strings. The platforms themselves are wired to exploit how we feel. “I think at the root, there is a kind of way that, on an emotional level, it’s not just manipulation of ideas, but there’s a kind of emotional engineering that’s built into the platforms and doesn’t even demand, you know, at first, government involvement.”

_____

Lemov peeled back the curtain on DARPA—the government’s controversial defense research agency—and its role in shaping the digital world we now live in. DARPA, she revealed, wasn’t just involved in building the internet. It may have laid the groundwork for emotional manipulation on a global scale. “DARPA was involved in the development of the internet and of things like pattern recognition,” she said. “The government has funded many, many studies.” What worries Lemov isn’t just the tech itself—but how it’s being used. “What I got interested in, in social media and how I connect it with the episodes of brainwashing—it creates states of emotional contagion that aren’t really about convincing people of a different way to think,” she explained. She continued: “But more about how you feel about what you think.” That emotional shift, she added, is straight out of the cult playbook. “It’s not that it changed my thoughts,” she said. “It’s how I felt about those thoughts.”

_____

That’s when Lemov exposed one of the darkest secrets in Big Tech history—a sinister Facebook experiment that quietly tampered with the emotions of 700,000 users.

And they never even knew it.

“There’s a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014, where they announce that they’ve achieved, mass emotional contagion at scale,” Lemov told Rogan.

She explained how Facebook altered users’ feeds without their consent.

“Whenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or AB testing. So this experiment exposed a group to a more—their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction emotionally, as measured by word counting software.”

And the results were disturbing.

“And they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way, as judged through their posts and likes and responses.”

“The group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response—and the control group was unaltered by this.”

In short, Facebook wasn’t just observing emotion—they were engineering it.

And nobody got a heads-up.

_____

The full scope of the experiment only became public two years later, when researchers finally admitted what they had done.

Facebook’s data scientists had manipulated the feeds of 689,003 people—removing either all the positive posts or all the negative ones to measure the emotional fallout.

If your feed in January 2012 felt unusually bleak or suspiciously upbeat, you may have unknowingly been part of the study.

The team behind it, led by data scientist Adam Kramer, published their findings in a scientific journal and laid out the results in cold detail:

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,” the paper said.

It was hard proof that emotions are contagious—and social media could be weaponized to control mood at scale.

The study ran for just one week, but for those caught in the algorithmic crossfire, the emotional effects may have lasted much longer.

_____

But here’s where it gets truly disturbing.

Lemov revealed that when the experiment finally came to light, the backlash was swift—and in some cases, tragic.

“But, so this is why there was an ethical debate when the experiment was published in 2014,” she said.

One user, Lemov recalled, had a chilling reaction.

“And on the Facebook page of the research group that that did the experiment, at least one user wrote in saying, could I ever find out if I was in that experiment.”

“Because I was in the emergency room at that time with, you know, threatening to commit suicide, and I want to know if my feed was altered and maybe that pushed me over, you know, into that that state.”

There was no way to know.

“Of course, they could never know and it can’t be traced backwards. And other people had a similar response.”

The scandal sparked an investigation by the British government, which considered sanctions over the international scope of the experiment.

“And there was even an investigation by the British government about whether this should be sanctioned because it affected users internationally,” Lemov said.

But in the end, there was no accountability.

“Ultimately, there doesn’t seem to have been any sanctions that came out of in anyone associated with it, is mostly promoted.”

No one punished. No warnings given.

And we’re all left wondering: how many more experiments are happening right now—hidden in plain sight?

Psych meds as Veblen goods

 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/psych-meds-and-veblen-goods

Psych Meds And Veblen Goods

by Tyler Durden

Tuesday, May 13, 2025 - 02:55 AM

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Commentary

In high school in West Texas in the late 1970s, psych meds were Veblen goods; that is, products desired as markers of status. They were conspicuously consumed by the children of the well-to-do with profound awareness that their schoolmates could afford neither the treatment nor the supposed cure.

Ollyy/Shutterstock

So the kids—I knew many of them and they would tolerate me in their circles from time to time—would brag about their diagnosis, their prescriptions, the mix, and how it made them feel.

They would carry their pills and show them off, rattling off names of this or that drug and laughing mischievously about it all. There was nothing particularly maudlin about them except as performance. They were genuinely proud, the way one might be when wearing an overpriced luxury coat or shoes. The pills were just part of the mix. So too, they paraded their supposed maladies as badges of honor.

There was always a sniffy air of detachment culture of these kids, a nonchalant disregard for all systems, whether school or family or church, even society at large. They were above it all, and the meds and the condition they were addressing were part of that. It was a class marker. There was even a hint of politics about it, an underscoring and display of alienation. They were at once the top of the social heap but disdainful of it.

Most of these kids excelled in their grades and set their sights high in college applications, with no doubt that they would succeed. They would do so despite their profound mental condition, which they blamed on parents, social structures, teachers, protocols, and the machine generally. Society had made them sick, but the meds gave them freedom to float above it all.

Fancy some lithium?

I’ve not followed their lives since then. Maybe they dropped them after college and lived normally. Maybe not. None will likely write memoirs, so we’ll never know. Regardless, in the decades since, this Veblen good went the way of all luxury purchases over time. It became mainstream. Psych meds are now common among adults and children. It’s a massive industry: like cell phones and TVs generations ago, they migrated through the class structure year by year.

Now comes “Unshrunk” by Laura Delano, a book that could change everything. If it were not an autobiography, it would make great fiction of the gothic sort popular in the Victorian period. If it stripped out all commentary on the dubious merit of all these supposed sicknesses and cures, it would still be fantastic drama from first to last.

Nothing I say can possibly prepare you for the adventure this book brings. It is perfectly crafted almost in a poetic way to bring to the reader the actual feeling of going through each stage over a decade and a half of drug cocktails, mental institutions, hospitals, and much more, and finally to her self-motivated emancipation from the whole industry.

I worry that the topic alone will deter readers. It should not. Read it the way you might a great work of fiction. It makes it all the more riveting to realize it is the real thing—an actual person—with all the attendant pain required for any author to pour out his or her soul this way. It’s a rare experience, one of a kind in our time.

In addition, even if you extracted all the detailed medical critiques about drug trials, side effects, market flimflam from these drugs, and turned that into a monograph on its own, it would be of enormous value.

So we really have here three books in one: a brilliant drama with a fantastic story arc, an autobiography of a young woman in a world set apart that most of us will never know, and a technical medical treatise on an entire industry.

Looming rather large in the narrative is the issue of social class. The author was born into a world unknown to most, the social-register set in Greenwich, Connecticut, descendent of a three-term president, a prep-school educated and Harvard-bound beneficiary of every financial and social privilege, one afforded the best psychiatric care available anywhere.

She was not mistreated. She was treated. She says this herself:

“I was once mentally ill, and now I’m not, and it wasn’t because I was misdiagnosed. I wasn’t improperly medicated or overmedicated. I haven’t miraculously recovered from supposed brain diseases that some of the country’s top psychiatrists told me I’d have for the rest of my life. In fact, I was properly diagnosed and medicated according to the American Psychiatric Association’s standard of care. The reason I’m no longer mentally ill is that I made a decision to question the ideas about myself that I’d assumed were fact and discard what I learned was actually fiction.”

The best of care. The best physicians. The best institutions. The best consultations. The best meds, constantly tweaked by experts: a bit more of this, a bit less of that, and here’s a new one. When Laura’s diagnosis was switched from Bipolar to Borderline, it was under the care of the very father of the supposed disease itself: Dr. John G. Gunderson at McLean Hospital at Harvard (which had also seen Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Susanna Kaysen).

She had every reason to trust the experts except for one telling fact: she never got better, only worse. She gradually concluded over time that her real trouble was iatrogenic; that is, induced by the very drugs that were said to be the solution.

The first hints of real recovery hit the reader once Laura starts attending Alcoholics Anonymous, where everyone cheered as people there revealed how long they had been sober. It struck me while reading, though the author doesn’t say this, that pretty much everyone gets that alcoholism is a huge issue and that the safest path for everyone is sobriety. No physician really recommends more drinking, more liquor, different kinds of liquor, more regular cocktails, as a solution to anything.

And yet a completely different standard applies to more powerful pharmaceutical cocktails. They are carefully dispensed on millions of patients, with warnings never to skip. That’s what bad patients do.

People who unwisely attempt to do without are rediagnosed with “discontinuation syndrome”—as if dropping toxins created a new disease—which of course calls forth new prescriptions.

The entire system is built to keep people on meds. And when one tries to dispense with them, the adapted body fights back with symptoms that seem to reinforce the diagnosis and the solution. We hope you see why we put you on these drugs in the first place!

Why the gigantic and upside-down judgment against one toxin (alcohol) and for all the others? Here is the core of the real scandal. It’s about the enormous power of industry, the mystique of science, the prestige of academia, and the class associations connected with high-status diagnosis and purported solutions.

This line of thinking opens up even broader critiques of the entire medical system and pharmaceuticals more generally. This book thoroughly explodes the popular understanding of mental illness and the capacity of the expert class to deal with it. The lessons are rattling to the point that no reader will look at commoditized pharmaceuticals in the same way.

In the COVID period, you recall, compliance with protocols was a class marker too. Only tacky people demanded their freedom, dared walk around stores without masks, or failed to social distance in elevators. Trashy types protested the lockdowns. Canadian truckers, indeed! What else do you need to know? The good people, the successful and high-earning professionals on laptops, stayed home, streamed movies, and stayed away from others.

I recall being shouted at while walking outdoors without a mask.

“Masks are socially recommended,” yelled a man, mangling a few phrases into a new coinage. There was fury in his voice that someone as lowlife as I would dare to be in his neighborhood, no doubt spreading COVID. I had otherized myself simply by my refusal to cover my face as if I revealed myself to be a vector of disease spread.

The moral landscape became crystal clear with the shot rollouts. Clean people get them. Dirty people refuse them. The model was primitive in the extreme but with a class bias that bled over to a kind of regional bigotry: the unvaccinated states went for Trump. Whole cities became segregated, as the culmination of an entire class-based outlook that split us from them. (See my big theory of clean vs dirty as a lens through which to understand the whole period.)

I never had much of an awareness of social class and its meaning in politics before this period. Suddenly, it was all that mattered, with government agencies delineating who was essential and who was not. Nor had I considered that medical protocols and products had emerged as a Veblen good, something to consume with pride in one’s high place in the social strata, like modern art and postmodern philosophy.

How brilliant of the psych med industry to market itself—beginning long ago—as a luxury good, a class marker, a product to be consumed by the privileged. There is something wrong in every life. Successful people fix it with pills. Take your meds: you are not a substance abuser but a highly responsible patient who can afford the best care. As the song says, the devil wore a lab coat.

Laura Delano’s book weaves together these pieces into an alarming tale of tragedy followed by final hope. From the first chapter in which the supposed problems begin, through the wild ups and downs and tales of 21 different meds (my count), I could not wait to see how the author would handle the ending.

The last chapters are perfect in ways I won’t reveal for fear of spoilers. My further hope is that this brief review will inspire many more people to travel this journey with the author and draw deep and broad lessons from it.

From the Brownstone Institute

Narcissism may be fueling political polarization, according to new psychology research

https://www.psypost.org/narcissism-may-be-fueling-political-polarization-according-to-new-psychology-research/

Narcissism may be fueling political polarization, according to new psychology research

by Eric W. Dolan May 9, 2025in Narcissism, Political Psychology

People with narcissistic personality traits—especially those who feel entitled and antagonistic—are more likely to display extreme loyalty to their political in-group and hostility toward their opponents, according to a new study published in Political Behavior. The research suggests that personality may play a central role in deepening affective polarization, regardless of party or ideological stance.

Affective polarization refers to the growing emotional divide between political groups, where individuals not only strongly identify with their own group but also express distrust, dislike, or even hatred toward opposing groups. While past research has often focused on ideological or demographic sources of this divide, the current study highlights how a common personality trait—narcissism—may predispose individuals to both fervent group loyalty and contempt for outsiders.

Narcissism is a personality trait centered around self-importance and entitlement. It involves a heightened sense of superiority, a strong desire for admiration, and in many cases, a tendency to demean or devalue others. The researchers focused on a particular form of narcissism called “grandiose narcissism,” which can be broken into two subtypes: admiration and rivalry. Admiration involves self-promotion and a desire to be seen as special, while rivalry is about defensiveness and antagonism—especially toward perceived threats to one’s status or ego.

“We often have a sense that ‘extremists’ have something in common, but it is unclear what that is,” explained study author James Tilley, a professor at the University of Oxford. “There is a sentence in a C. P. Snow novel (The Affair) that I quote in my new book (Tribal Politics with Sara Hobolt, due out next year) that sums this up nicely: “They stood at the two extremes, both utterly recalcitrant. As often with extremists, they felt linked. They had a kinship, much more than with their own sides, the safe and sensible people in the middle.'”

“Our idea was that disposition, or personality, helps explain why people have 1) different levels of attachment to their own political identity and 2) different levels of animosity towards people with a different political identity,” Tilley continued. “Previous research has not found consistent links between the standard Big-5 personality traits and affective polarization, so we wanted to explore the role of narcissism.”

The researchers conducted a two-wave national panel survey in Britain using data collected by the polling company YouGov. The first wave, in March 2021, included over 3,500 adults and measured their personality traits. In July 2021, about 2,000 of those same individuals completed a follow-up survey assessing their political identities and attitudes toward in-group and out-group partisans. The time gap between the surveys helped reduce the chance that political questions would influence how participants responded to personality measures.

Participants were asked about both traditional party identities (e.g., Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat) and newer political groupings related to Brexit (Leavers and Remainers). Roughly three-quarters of respondents reported identifying with a political party or a Brexit position.

To measure narcissism, the researchers used the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ), an 18-item scale that distinguishes between admiration and rivalry. Participants rated how much they agreed with statements like “I am great” or “I want my rivals to fail.” Higher scores indicated greater narcissistic tendencies.

The researchers also measured affective polarization in two parts. First, they assessed in-group affinity using questions like whether criticism of one’s political group felt like a personal insult or whether participants felt connected to other group members. Second, they measured out-group animosity using items that captured emotional reactions to opposing groups, such as feeling good when the opposing party was criticized or getting angry when it was praised.

The researchers found a clear pattern: people with higher levels of narcissism were more likely to report both stronger emotional ties to their own group and more intense animosity toward political opponents. This held true across both party and Brexit identities. Importantly, narcissism had a stronger association with out-group animosity than with in-group affinity. In other words, narcissistic individuals were more likely to dislike their opponents than to express admiration for their own side.

When broken down by narcissism subtype, the researchers found that rivalry—the aspect marked by defensiveness, entitlement, and antagonism—was the strongest driver of affective polarization. People high in rivalry expressed greater loyalty to their political in-group and significantly more negative feelings toward the out-group. In contrast, the admiration subtype had only weak or inconsistent effects.

“People high in narcissism tend to have a stronger attachment to people who share their politics and are also more hostile towards people on the other side of the political debate,” Tilley told PsyPost.

“This association is mostly due to the ‘rivalry’ aspect of narcissism rather than the ‘admiration’ aspect. ‘Rivalry’ is less about feelings of superiority, and more about feelings of antagonistic entitlement. This form of entitlement means that people are hostile to political out-groups (people on the other side), but also cling more strongly to their in-group (people on their own side) due a greater perceived threat of the out-group.”

These results held even when accounting for other well-established personality traits, such as the Big Five dimensions (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Among these, only neuroticism came close to matching the effect of narcissism on political attitudes, but its impact was still consistently smaller. The findings suggest that rivalry in particular may play a unique and underappreciated role in shaping political divisions.

Interestingly, the influence of narcissism on polarization appeared relatively consistent across identity types. Whether someone identified as a Remainer or a Leaver, a Conservative or a Labour supporter, narcissism predicted more extreme political attitudes. This points to a deeper psychological commonality among highly polarized individuals—regardless of which side they are on.

Despite its strengths, the study has some limitations. Because the data is observational, the findings show association rather than causation. It remains possible, for example, that being deeply involved in partisan politics might reinforce narcissistic traits over time.

“It is possible that people with strong political identities may become more narcissistic,” Tilley noted. “Our results simply show a correlation. Having said that, we measure personality three months prior to the political attitudes, so any reverse causation is not due to immediate survey effects.”

The researchers argue that these findings have important implications for understanding both mass and elite polarization. At the mass level, they raise the possibility that rising narcissism—if occurring generationally or culturally—could be contributing to increasingly divided electorates. At the elite level, the results may help explain why political leaders, who tend to score high on narcissistic traits, often appear more polarized than average citizens.

“One consistent, and unsurprising, finding in the literature is that politicians score highly in narcissism,” Tilley explained. “The more we select narcissistic politicians at elections, the more we might expect elite politics to become affectively polarized and uncivil. To the extent that affective polarization is a ‘bad thing,’ this is probably not good news because voters often take their cues from politicians.”

The study, “Narcissism and Affective Polarization,” was authored by James Tilley and Sara Hobolt.