Bad news travels fast--when you watch the evening news or read the morning papers, it seems that things that get the most coverage are all tragedies like wars, earthquakes, floods, fires and murders. This is the classic rule for mass media. "They want your eyeballs and don't care how you're feeling," Jonah Berger, a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times. But with social media getting increasingly popular, information is now being spread in different ways, and researchers are discovering new rules--good news can actually spread faster and farther than disasters and other sad stories. Berger and his colleague Katherine Milkman looked at thousands of articles on The New York Times' website and analyzed the "most e-mailed" list for six months. One of his findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list. Those stories aroused feelings of awe   and made the readers want to share this positive emotion with others. Besides science stories, readers were also found to be likely to share articles that were exciting or funny. "The more positive an article was, the more likely it was to be shared," Berger wrote in his new book. "For example, stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City," he writes, "tended to be shared more than the death of a popular zookeeper." But does all this good news actually make the audience feel better? Not necessarily. According to a study by researchers at Harvard University, people tend to say more positive things about themselves when they're talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person, which helps explain all the perfect vacations that keep showing up on microblogs. This, researchers found, makes people think that life is unfair and that they're less happy than their friends. But no worries. There's a quick and easy way to relieve the depression you get from viewing other people's seemingly perfect lives--turn on the television and watch the news. There is always someone doing worse than you are. Which of the following might be e-mailed most according to Berger?
The perfect vacation of your friend The story of a determined inventor The death of a popular zookeeper The flood hitting a small town