RESEARCH ARTICLE Red, Purple and Pink: The Colors of Diffusion on Pinterest Saeideh Bakhshi1*, Eric Gilbert2 1 HCI Research Group, Yahoo Labs, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 2 College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America *
[email protected] Abstract Many lab studies have shown that colors can evoke powerful emotions and impact human behavior. Might these phenomena drive how we act online? A key research challenge for image-sharing communities is uncovering the mechanisms by which content spreads through the community. In this paper, we investigate whether there is link between color and diffusion. Drawing on a corpus of one million images crawled from Pinterest, we find OPEN ACCESS that color significantly impacts the diffusion of images and adoption of content on image Citation: Bakhshi S, Gilbert E (2015) Red, Purple sharing communities such as Pinterest, even after partially controlling for network structure and Pink: The Colors of Diffusion on Pinterest. PLoS and activity. Specifically, Red, Purple and pink seem to promote diffusion, while Green, ONE 10(2): e0117148. doi:10.1371/journal. Blue, Black and Yellow suppress it. To our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate pone.0117148 how colors relate to online user behavior. In addition to contributing to the research conver- Academic Editor: Simon J. Cropper, University of sation surrounding diffusion, these findings suggest future work using sophisticated com- Melbourne, AUSTRALIA puter vision techniques. We conclude with a discussion on the theoretical, practical and Received: March 17, 2014 design implications suggested by this work—e.g. design of engaging image filters.