Summary: New research reveals people are more likely to share social media posts they find personally relevant or valuable to their relationships. The study found that prompting users to consider the value of a post increased activity in brain areas linked to sharing decisions, boosting their motivation to share.
Participants were more likely to share health-related articles when they thought about how the information could help someone else or shape a positive self-presentation. This research could pave the way for more effective health communication strategies.
Key Facts:
- People are more likely to share social media posts that they perceive as relevant to themselves or their relationships.
- Brain areas associated with decision-making about sharing were more active when participants were prompted to consider the value of the information in the post.
- Encouraging users to think about how sharing a post could help someone else or enhance their own image increased their willingness to share the content.
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Why do some social media posts get shared widely, while others go unnoticed?
Research from the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that social media users are likely to share posts that contain information that they feel is relevant to themselves or to the people they know.
In other words, people share posts that they believe to have value — either to themselves or to their relationships with others.
A new study from the lab has found that merely encouraging people to consider the value led to increased activity in the areas of the brain associated with sharing decisions and increased a person’s motivation to share an article.
“A lot of prior research on what makes posts go viral has focused on identifying the characteristics of messages that are shared often or not shared often,” says lead author Christin Scholz, Assistant Professor in Persuasive Communication at the University of Amsterdam and Annenberg graduate.
“We’re looking at the neural mechanisms of sharing decisions. Targeting those mechanisms could be a way to encourage the spread of high quality health information.”
During the study, led by senior author Emily Falk, Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing and Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab, participants were instructed to consider sharing articles about healthy living from The New York Times while their brain activity was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Inside the fMRI scanner, participants were asked to think about sharing an article with a specific goal in mind: to either “help somebody” (use the article to relate positively to others) or to “describe yourself” (use the article to present yourself positively to others). As a control, participants were assigned the neutral “to spread information” goal.
“In all areas of life, people want to present themselves in a positive light or to relate positively to others,” Scholz says.
“Our method encourages people to identify ways in which they can fulfill these motives through the sharing of health articles. If they are successful, they should be more likely to decide to share the article.”
After reading the headline and summary of a health-related article, participants were asked to consider what they might say or write to another study participant if they were to share the article with them, keeping in mind their assigned goal. Finally, participants rated their likelihood to share the article in real life.
Thinking about sharing in terms of how it might help someone else not only increased activation in brain regions associated with self-related thinking, value-related thinking, and social-related thinking (particularly mentalizing — the act of imagining what others are thinking), but also increased a person’s self-reported willingness to share an article.
“I think we’re only scratching the surface in terms of how you could encourage people to share high quality health information,” Scholz says.
“A health communicator might want to focus on being accurate and clear and not have to worry about whether their content is emotional to get clicks.
“We’re trying to find ways to focus on the would-be sharer, to help them find personal meaning in sharing content that can benefit others and society.”
About this psychology research news
Author: Julie Sloan
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Contact: Julie Sloan – University of Pennsylvania
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Invoking self-related and social thoughts impacts online information sharing” by Christin Scholz et al. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Abstract
Invoking self-related and social thoughts impacts online information sharing
Online sharing impacts which information is widely available and influential in society. Yet, systematically influencing sharing behavior remains difficult. Past research highlights two factors associated with sharing: the social and self-relevance of the to-be-shared content.
Based on this prior neuroimaging work and theory, we developed a manipulation in the form of short prompts that are attached to media content (here health news articles).
These prompts encourage readers to think about how sharing the content may help them to fulfill motivations to present themselves positively (self-relevance) or connect positively to others (social relevance).
Fifty-three young adults completed this pre-registered experiment while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Ninety-six health news articles were randomly assigned to three within-subject conditions that encouraged self-related or social thinking or a control.
Invoking self-related or social thoughts about health-related news (vs control) (i) causally increased brain activity in a priori regions of interest chosen for their roles in processing social and self-relevance and (ii) causally impacted self-reported sharing intentions.
This study provides evidence corroborating prior reverse inferences regarding the neural correlates of sharing. It further highlights the feasibility and utility of targeting neuropsychological processes to systematically facilitate online information spread.
