How To Get People To Share Trustworthy Information Online
New research from the Communication Neuroscience Lab finds that people tend to share news that they find relevant to themselves or to people they know.
As people increasingly use social media to receive news and information, the surge of false, inaccurate, and misleading information online — and the race to stop it — has captured the spotlight in both public discourse and academic research. In a new study, researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania investigate a novel way to address this issue: encouraging people to share high-quality, trustworthy information online.
Led by Danielle Cosme, Scientific Director of the Climate Communication division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Senior Researcher in the Communication Neuroscience Lab at Annenberg, the study pulls from four different experiments that investigated what makes people more likely to share articles on climate change and health topics, which included over 2,500 participants in the U.S. and the Netherlands.
Previous research by the lab found that people share social media posts and news articles that they think are the most relevant to themselves or to people they know, which inspired researchers to ask if prompting people to reflect on or write about why a news story matters to them or their communities would increase motivation to share.
It did. In the study published in PNAS Nexus, the researchers found that these content-framing interventions (asking someone to reflect on why an article has self- or social-relevance) boost both the intention to share and actual sharing behavior.
“The ability to make informed decisions and tackle pressing societal challenges — like climate change and public health — hinges on the quality of the information individuals consume and share,” Cosme says. “These findings are exciting because they point to relatively simple ways to promote the spread of accurate, high-quality news. By helping people identify why a piece of news matters to them or those they care about, we can encourage broader and more meaningful engagement with accurate information.”
The research team, which includes senior author Emily Falk, Vice Dean of the Annenberg School and Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab, used a combination of large-scale behavioral experiments, online field studies, and functional MRI (fMRI) to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms behind sharing decisions.
They found that brain regions associated with self-reflection became more active when participants considered why an article was personally or socially meaningful, and greater activity in self- and social-related brain regions was associated with stronger intentions to share news.
“The work builds on our lab’s longstanding interest in how ideas and behaviors spread,” Falk says. “When people see news as relevant to themselves or useful for strengthening social connections, they are more motivated to share it.”
Interestingly, these neural and psychological mechanisms were impactful across topics as well as cultures. Americans weren’t the only ones whose intentions to share were boosted when they perceived the news to be personally or socially relevant. In an experiment led by Christin Scholz (Ph.D. '18) of the University of Amsterdam, Dutch participants also showed positive relationships between activity in self-referential and social cognitive brain regions and sharing intentions.
“These results provide a great example for how basic science can have real implications for people’s everyday lives,” Scholz says. “Observing brain activity while study participants made sharing decisions helped us to isolate basic psycho-physiological processes relevant to sharing. Dutch people and Americans may differ in many ways, but share basic human motivations, such as wanting to appear in a positive light and connecting positively with others. Interventions that target and utilize such basic processes are more likely to be impactful across different groups.”
The researchers also observed that these interventions had ripple effects, influencing participants’ beliefs and intentions around climate action beyond the articles themselves.
“Our research suggests that activating self and social relevance is a powerful, scalable way to encourage the spread of trustworthy content,” says Cosme.
This work adds to a growing body of research by the Communication Neuroscience Lab investigating how humans decide which information to share and uncovering new strategies to increase the reach of accurate information.
“Perceived self and social relevance of content motivates news sharing across cultures and topics” was published in PNAS Nexus and authored by Danielle Cosme, Hang-Yee Chan, Alyssa H. Sinclair, Christian Benitez, Kirsten Lydic, Rebecca E. Martin, Anthony Resnick, José Carreras-Tartak, Nicole Cooper, Alexandra M. Paul, David Koelle, Jennifer McVay, Emily B. Falk, and Christin Scholz.
