How a users personality influences content engagement in social media

📝 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.

💡 Analysis

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.

📄 Content

How a user’s personality influences content engagement in social media Nathan O. Hodas1, Ryan Butner2, Court Corley1 1Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA {nhodas,court}@pnnl.gov 2Monsanto, St. Louis, MO ryan.scott.butner@monsanto.com

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 sys- tematic variations between users that can help us better understand information propagation? We conducted an experiment exploring social media usage during disaster scenarios, combining elec- troencephalogram (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 con- tent. 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 im- port factor in understanding social contagion.

1 Introduction
Whether for disaster response, advertising campaigns, or general entertainment, people leverage social media to spread information to wide and varied audiences. When crafting a message on social media, authors may attempt to consider humor (Evers et al. 2013), trustworthiness (Kietzmann et al. 2011), or timeliness (Lee and Ma 2012), among other factors, to increase the reach of their message. Authors may not consider the personality or mood of target

users when anticipating the impact and propagation of their messages. Systematic biases in target populations will confound attempts to understand social contagion (Hodas and Lerman 2014). Because of homophily, personality types will not be randomly distributed in the social net- work, and users will be exposed to content biased by the personality of their friends (Hodas et al. 2013). It is im- portant to better understand the link between personality, mood and social contagion. In this paper, we reveal a systematic link between per- sonality type and mood, brain response, and the type of content people choose to share online. Although it comes as no surprise that there is a relationship between how someone uses social media and their personality (Ryan and Xenos 2011; Correa et al. 2010; Hughes et al. 2012), this is the first experiment that measured both the user’s present mood and personality, quantitative measures of engage- ment and interest, as well as their final reactions to the content. We originally conducted this research in the con- text of understanding user’s responses to natural disasters via social media. In the methods section below we explore this experiment in detail, including how users were as- sessed for personality and mood, were shown videos de- scribing the disasters, then asked to share (or not) tweets and emergency alerts, all while being continuously moni- tored via electroencephalogram (EEG). In this way, we have quantitative measures of personality, attention, and action.
The main finding of this paper is that users systematical- ly prefer different types of content, and that this content depends on their personality and mood in significant ways. The different types of content, such as “informative”, “so- cial”, or “sympathetic,” which we describe below, each resonate differently depending on personality and mood.
For example, as one would expect, extroverts are more likely to share any content, consistent with previous find- ings. However, we also find that users that score highest on measures of depression were more likely to share in- formative messages, compared to the least depressed users.

2 Because of correlation between content, type of infor- mation, and personality, we show that different types of personalities will be more responsive to different kinds of information campaigns. The paper is presented as follows. First, we discuss the unique experiment we conducted and describe the methods we used to understand user behavior. Next, we describe the results of our experiments and discuss their importance to understanding how personality impacts information trans- mission. Lastly, we compare our work to the existing liter- ature. Our unique contribution is to separate personality from engagement using brain monitoring, revealing that the personality and mood of targeted users plays a signifi- cant role in determining the type of information that gets selected by users to share.

2 Methods The purpose of this project, using an electroencephalogram (EEG) data-driven approach, was to evaluate the physio- logic

This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.