Will you email this post?

What kind of content makes it to the most e-mailed list? Two researchers did a study on it. And found that "People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics".

The intensive study was based on the New York Times list of most e-mailed articles. They kept analyzing the content of the shared articles every 15 minutes for more than six months.

For studying the "viral" trends, 3,000 articles were rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers found that people forwarded more articles about science than more practical topics.They genuinely wanted information about the world and felt very "small" as compared to the big wide world.

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

“An article about square watermelons is surprising, but it doesn’t inspire that awed feeling that the world is a broad place and I’m so small.”

Read on here.