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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H- Cash from Harvard Business Review. I am Sarah Green. I am

talking today with Wharton Professor Jonah Berger, author of the book Contagious,

How Things Catch On.

Jonah, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Thanks for having me.

So Jonah, in your research, you examine some of the reasons people share content on the internet, share products by word of mouth,

and one of the reasons you give has to do with emotion, and that's not terribly surprising in and of itself.

But what did surprise me was how different emotions are not

exactly created equal when it comes to sharing things. Can you just tell us a

little bit about how different emotions cause us to react differently when we're spreading the news

about a new product or a new piece of content?

You might think that all emotions are created equal.

That all give us an equal likelihood of sharing.

When you might think that positive emotions make us share,

but negative emotions don't.

Share positive things because that makes us look good and smart.

We avoid sharing negative things because we don't want to be a

Debbie downer or put others in a bad mood but when we look deeper we found that

...