Dr. Frank Waddell from The Pennsylvania State University and Dr. S. Shyam Sundar from Stanford University set out to discover if social media comments can affect television viewers’ overall thoughts of an audience’s feelings about a particular program, or if these comments can actually affect these viewers’ own personal pleasure.
Participants in the study viewed video clips while looking at either positive or negative social media comments. They were then asked to rate certain aspects such as “program enjoyment” and “participants’ level of bandwagon perceptions.”
Waddell and Sunday determined that “negative social media comments elicited lower levels of program enjoyment via perceptions of low bandwagon support, while positive social media comments did not affect program enjoyment directly or indirectly.”
The full text of the study can be read in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61(2), 2017, pp. 393-409 DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2017.1309414