Member-only story
Is it just pictures of cats that we share on social media? That is an old tired cliché — most of social media does not have post of cats on them and all manner of things are shared.
Emotionality obviously drives much of this sharing — but a group of researchers around Danielle Cosme at the Communication Neuroscience Lab from the University of Pennsylvania have recently published their findings of their studies into this question and come up with a slightly different answer.
For this they analysed the behaviour of over 3,000 individuals with regard to content and willingness to share this, over multiple experiments.
These people were exposed to articles on social media posts about health, climate, politics, and COVID-19. They then rated how relevant they thought the articles were to themselves and others and how likely they would share the information.
What they saw is that those who saw the information as self- or socially-relevant were much more likely to share. This may sound obvious, but it shows that sharing is seen as a socially useful tool to spread relevant information. Of interest is also that those in the study who were asked to write out why they thought a message was relevant to themselves or others were more likely to share in contrast to just thinking about it.
