How a user’s 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.