What makes the news widely shared? The answer is in your head – ScienceDaily

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Research from the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication has shown that social media users are likely to share posts that contain information they feel is relevant to them or to people they know.

In other words, people share posts that they believe have value, either to themselves or to their relationships with others.

A new study from the lab found that simply encouraging people to consider value led to increased activity in areas of the brain associated with sharing decisions and increased a person’s motivation to share an item.

“Much previous research on what makes posts go viral has focused on identifying characteristics of messages that are shared often or not,” says lead author Christin Scholz, an assistant professor of persuasive communication at the University of Amsterdam and Annenberg graduate. “We are looking at the neural mechanisms of shared decision-making. Targeting those mechanisms could be a way to encourage the dissemination of high-quality health information.”

During the study, led by lead author Emily Falk, a professor of communication, psychology, and marketing and director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory, participants were instructed to consider sharing articles about healthy living by The New York Times while their brain activity was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Within the fMRI scanner, participants were asked to think about sharing an item with a specific goal in mind: “help someone” (use the item to relate positively to others) or “describe yourself” (use the item to present yourself positively to others). As a control, the participants were assigned the neutral goal of “disseminating information.”

“In all areas of life, people want to present themselves in a positive light or relate positively to others,” says Scholz. “Our method encourages people to identify ways in which they can fulfill these reasons by sharing health articles. If they are successful, they are more likely to decide to share the article.”

After reading the title and abstract 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, given the assigned goal. Finally, the participants rated their likelihood of sharing the article in real life.

Thinking about sharing in terms of how it might help another person not only increase activation in brain regions associated with self-related thinking, value-related thinking, and social-related thinking (particularly mentalizing, act of imagining what others are thinking), but also increased a person’s self-reported willingness to share an article.

“I think we’re just scratching the surface in terms of how you could encourage people to share high-quality health information,” says Scholz. “A health communicator might want to focus on being precise 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 potential sharer, to help them find personal meaning in sharing. content that can benefit others and society.