When news is repeatedly retold it undergoes a stylistic transformation (disagreeable personalization), wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations, with a slant toward negativity

The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News. Shiri Melumad, Robert Meyer, Yoon Duk Kim. Journal of Marketing Research, January 7, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720987147

Abstract: In this work we advance and test a theory of how news information evolves as it is successively retold by consumers. Drawing on data from almost 11,000 participants across ten experiments, we offer evidence that when news is repeatedly retold it undergoes a stylistic transformation termed disagreeable personalization, wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations, with a slant toward negativity. Specifically, the central thesis of the work is that, when retellers believe that they are more (vs. less) knowledgeable than their recipient about the information they are relaying, they feel more compelled to provide guidance on its meaning, and to do so in a persuasive manner. This enhanced motivation to guide persuasively, in turn, leads retellers to not only select the subset of facts they deem most essential but, critically, to provide their interpretations and opinions on those facts, with negativity being used as a means of grabbing the audience’s attention. Implications of the work for prior research on retelling and consumer information diffusion are explored.

Keywords: word-of-mouth, information diffusion, retelling, social media, natural language processing