How tweets can ruin TV shows

Negative tweets go a long way. Most recently scientists discovered that nasty comments about TV shows can actually drive down the enjoyment of a series for the rest of the viewers. Positive tweets, on the other hand, do not have the same effects.

A new study shows just how the bandwagon effects function when it comes to our enjoyment of TV shows. S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, devised a study in which the participants saw negative messages, in the form of tweets, flashing on the screen while they were watching a sitcom clip.

The result, published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, states that viewers that read the nasty tweets found that they enjoyed the video, less.

“People who saw the negative tweets were less likely to enjoy the program because they thought other people didn’t like it,” said Sundar. “It was directly affected by what they thought others thought.”

What it all comes down to, according to assistant professor T. Franklin Waddell from the University of Florida, is the people’s tendency to adopt beliefs and ideas just because they think others hold similar ones. It’s what researchers have called the bandwagon effect and thou the scientists hoped that the effect will be dampened by the need to be unique or that it would only impact certain types of people, they found the phenomenon to be quite consistent across the board.

“We had expected that negative comments would only affect certain types of viewers who are predisposed to follow the crowd, but surprisingly, these findings were quite consistent across a variety of different personality types,” said Waddell.

The bandwagon effect manifests in several ways in various forms of media and social media, added Sundar.

“The bandwagon effect could be in the form of star ratings, the number of viewers, number of views, number of shares, for example,” said Sundar. “And, as in this case, the effect could be positive or negative.”

The scientists also found that it does not take much to get the wagon going. Three negative comments can do the job.

“While you might only see two or three comments during a television program, this small handful of comments is enough for viewers to automatically make judgments about how viewers as a whole feel towards programming,” said Waddell. “These perceptions of group opinion, in turn, can cause viewers to hop on — or hop off — the bandwagon for a television show.”

Sundar also says that since the negative comments impacted participants more than the positive ones, we could be dealing with a negative bias, that is, people are more likely to be convinced by a negative information than a positive one. And this could have implications when it comes to news.

“The negativity bias suggests that individuals may be more likely to recall and be persuaded by negative information, rather than positive information,” said Sundar. “Positive news — when good things happen — doesn’t seem to be as memorable for us compared to when something negative happens.”

While the scientists say that wider range studies are needed in order to fully understand the phenomenon, the small research can give important clues to broadcasters and media outlets.

“The effects we found are small, which is to be expected given that people base their enjoyment of television programming on a variety of reasons, with online comments simply being one part of the larger puzzle overall,” said Waddell. “With that said, this study does contribute to a larger body of work, which consistently shows that negative comments undercut media credibility and enjoyment, from online news to popular television shows. In short, the benefits that broadcasters might hope to achieve through social television, such as bolstering enjoyment, and the actual reality of how comments affect viewers, appear to be in competition with one another.”