Our willingness to share information online plays a huge role in the spread of misinformation, so understanding why people share content is hugely important. Research from Penn aims to shed some light on the psychology of sharing.

The researchers analyzed the online behavior of over 3,000 people, and found that our propensity to share content is driven by whether we think it is meaningful to either ourselves or those we know. It’s a finding that the researchers believe is crucial to helping ensure that messaging for social causes is effective and that misinformation is not so widespread.

Socially relevant

The study highlights how we predominantly focus our attention on information we perceive as relevant to ourselves. What’s more, we thrive on connectivity with others, so actively consider their wants when sharing information with them, which is something known as “social relevance”.

The findings emerged after an experiment in which volunteers were exposed to content around topics such as climate change, Covid, and health. Some of the participants only read summaries and headlines of articles, others read the social media posts about the articles. All were asked to rate the likelihood that they will share the content with others, and how relevant they found it both for themselves and those they know.

The experiment found that regardless of the topic, or indeed the medium, we’re most likely to share content we believe is relevant to either ourselves or those we know. What’s more, we’re even more likely to share content when we’re asked to elucidate why we think it’s relevant.

“Sharing information is a critical component of individual and collective action,” the researchers explain. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we needed to quickly spread accurate information about what was going on, how to protect ourselves, how to protect each other. Information spreading within social networks can be really impactful for changing our individual behavior, and also changing our collective behavior through shifting our perceptions of what’s normative.”

Improving sharing

The researchers believe that their work can help us to better craft effective messaging. For instance, they suggest that people could be recruited who clearly find content relevant to themselves or their peers in order to amplify the message. It might even be effective to frame messages as self- or socially relevant.

“We developed message frames that could be paired with existing news and social media posts,” the authors explain. “This means that the same prompts that worked in this study could be tested easily in other contexts as well.”

To build on these initial findings, the researchers are exploring our brain activity when we share content online. They’re analyzing data from fMRI scanners to understand the areas of the brain that help to shape our perceptions of self and social relevance.

“Big issues require collective action,” they conclude. “Sharing is one key lever for shifting cultural norms and motivating larger scale action, so it’s really important to understand what makes it happen.”