How Hating Ramsay Bolton Makes You Love Game Of Thrones

We'd be lying if we said we're not going to miss watching the despicable Ramsay Bolton and his evil ways just a little bit. We may have loathed the Game of Thrones villain, but apparently that's part of the show's draw for many of us. A new study from data analytics startup Canvs shows that people who hate something about (or someone on) a show are more likely to keep tuning in, as Variety reports. Researchers cross-referenced Nielsen viewership ratings with Twitter reactions for 6,000 different recently aired episodes of TV. They categorized Twitter reactions to each episode by emotion and tracked the viewership week to week. The study found that when it comes to drama and reality shows, the more Twitter reactions expressing hate that an episode elicits, the more people tune in the next week. (Ahem, Bachelorette super-villain Chad, anyone?) In fact, the increased-viewership effect is more than twice as powerful for "hate" reactions as it is for "love" reactions. So, there you go — you're not a weirdo if you relish watching the bad guys be bad guys. Hate-watching is real.