Despite our increasing efforts to understand how and why content goes viral, it largely remains something of a mystery.  A couple of recent papers attempt to shed some light on the matter by examining the neuroscience of viral content.

The researchers wanted to examine the activity that goes on in the brain as we decide whether to share a piece of content or not.  The study used a series of health related articles from the New York Times and by the end was able to accurately predict which content would ‘go viral’.

“People are interested in reading or sharing content that connects to their own experiences, or to their sense of who they are or who they want to be,” the authors say. “They share things that might improve their relationships, make them look smart or empathic or cast them in a positive light.”

Brain activity

The researchers monitored the brain activity of people in real time as they viewed 80 health articles from the New York Times.  For each article, they rated how likely they were to share them.

The researchers were particularly looking to examine areas of the brain related to self-related thinking and imagining what others might think.  The hypothesis being tested was whether we think about ourselves when deciding what to read, and other people when deciding what to share.

Interestingly though, this wasn’t quite what emerged.  Instead, regardless of whether thinking about reading or sharing, we think of both ourselves and other people, with the thought processes associated with sharing bringing out the highest level of brain activity in both neural systems.

“When you’re thinking about what to read yourself and about what to share, both are inherently social, and when you’re thinking socially, you’re often thinking about yourself and your relationships to others,” the authors say. “Your self-concept and understanding of the social world are intertwined.”

This then fed into a second study that examined whether viral content can be predicted.  The brain data was compared with the number of shares the 80 articles received, and it emerged that activity in the self-related and mentalizing regions of the brain create a ‘score’ of the value of each article, which in turn signals whether we will share it or not.

“If we can use a small number of brains to predict what large numbers of people who read the New York Times are doing, it means that similar things are happening across people,” the authors say. “The fact that the articles strike the same chord in different brains suggests that similar motivations and similar norms may be driving these behaviors. Similar things have value in our broader society.”

Viral heuristics

Suffice to say, the authors readily acknowledge that their analysis is not capable of providing individual insights into why people share, as this clearly varies from individual to individual, but the neural analysis does provide a common denominator between the social and self-related thinking that is useful.

“In practice, if you craft a message in a way that makes the reader understand how it’s going to make them look positive, or how it could enhance a relationship,” they conclude, “then we predict it would increase the likelihood of sharing that message.”