The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The Role of Motivation, Attention, and Design in the Spread of Moralized Content Online

By W. Brady, Molly J. Crockett, J. V. Bavel. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2019

333 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important role in the spread of moralized content (a phenomenon we call moral contagion). Next, we propose a psychological model called the motivation, attention, and design (MAD) model to explain moral contagion. The MAD model posits that people have group-identity-based motivations to share moral-emotional content, that such content is especially likely to capture our attention, and that the design of social-media platforms amplifies our natural motivational and cognitive tendencies to spread such content. We review each component of the model (as well as interactions between components) and raise several novel, testable hypotheses that can spark progress on the scientific investigation of civic engagement and activism, political polarization, propaganda and disinformation, and other moralized behaviors in the digital age.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2c780dbfacc7eb7448cf137a03a5d99761adf84

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Citations in the corpus

Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news (2018, background): “Fake news are mainly shared through social media (Vosoughi et al., 2018), and political content tends to be shared within ideological echo chambers (Brady et al., 2017; Brady et al., 2020).”
Art and the science of generative AI (2023, background): “Indeed, people’s attention is often focused away from accuracy when browsing social media and instead attention is often oriented towards moral [102], emotional [103, 104] and sensational content [105].”
Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing (2020, background): “Theorizing about the relationships between the types of political and psychological factors we have highlighted above and the media format should yield important insights about the nature of information spread across these different platforms (Brady et al., 2020).”