How a user's personality influences content engagement in social media
This research addresses the problem of understanding information propagation and social contagion in social media for platforms and users, though it is incremental in linking personality to specific content types.
The study investigated how personality traits affect content engagement on social media, finding that extroverts are more likely to share content overall, while individuals with depressive personalities are most likely to share informative content like news or alerts.
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.