Abstract
Social media presents an opportunity for people to share content that they find to be significant, funny, or notable. No single piece of content will appeal to all users, but are there systematic variations between users that can help us better understand information propagation? We conducted an experiment exploring social media usage during disaster scenarios, combining electroencephalogram (EEG), personality surveys, and prompts to share social media, we show how personality not only drives willingness to engage with social media, but also helps to determine what type of content users find compelling. As expected, extroverts are more likely to share content. In contrast, one of our central results is that individuals with depressive personalities are the most likely cohort to share informative content, like news or alerts. Because personality and mood will generally be highly correlated between friends via homophily, our results may be an import factor in understanding social contagion.
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The following are plots of average squared EEG on the F8 channel for response for messages the users decided to share. We believe F8 the most discriminative channel during retweeting. Each trait is broken down according to the top quartile (users have the “most” of that trait), and bottom quartile (users with the “least” of that trait). Higher signals indicate more engagement and attention to the message.
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Hodas, N.O., Butner, R., Corley, C. (2016). How a User’s Personality Influences Content Engagement in Social Media. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10046. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_30
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