Scroll Top

New brain research discovers people are great at predicting what’ll go viral

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Why does anything go viral? Ask a million people and a million people will have a million different answers, but according to new research the real answer’s inside your head.

 

I have to admit that as I read through the science behind this news, which to be fair, seems credible I’m sitting here wondering if this post will go viral, after all, and as you’ll be able to see for yourself it should tick all three of your brains boxes. And for those of you sitting on the fence – share it anyway, you know it’ll make you look good. We’ll see…

Every day people all around the world send over 4 billion Facebook messages, 500 million tweets and 200 billion E-Mails out into the world – and those are just the teenagers out there – and each day, some of the stories and images we share spread like wildfire, going viral and taking over the internet in a heartbeat.And sometimes this viral content ends up altering, and shaping, our understanding of the world.

 

RELATED
The Pentagon wants to test a space based particle beam weapon by 2023

 

Now researchers think they might have finally found out what drives us to share, and as it turns out our brain activity is pretty good at predicting which articles are going to go viral.

study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asked a small group of participants to read the headlines and abstracts of 80 New York Times Health articles and consider whether or not they might share it with friends on social media. Meanwhile, researchers watched their brain activity with functional MRI (fMRI), which is able to zero in on, and precisely image the minute variations in the blood vessels in our brain. In fact, for those who haven’t come across fMRI then firstly why aren’t you reading more of my articles, and secondly it’s the same technology that’s helping scientists, and the police pull images and movies straight out of our heads. Telepathy has nothing on this technology…

Anyway, back to the story, as it turns out the more active certain brain areas were in the study, the more shared an article was – not just in the study, but out in the real world.

“We wanted to use the neural activity to explain why some articles are more viral than other articles,” says study author Christin Scholz, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. To do this, she and her colleagues looked at three particular important regions of the brain – the “self-processing” areas, the “social processing” areas, and the “value” areas.

The value areas become more active as you assign “value” to things you encounter in the world, in this case like a New York Times article. The value regions of your brain get more blood flow when you’re presented with something you think of as being generally valuable and good, for example, they’ll become more active when you see a candy bar you like than when you see a vegetable you hate. Meanwhile areas of the brain associated with self-processing are known to experience increased blood flow when you think about yourself, or think about whether sharing an article will make you look good, and the social processing system, which is pretty extensive, becomes more active when you think about the social outcome of sharing.

 

RELATED
An AI just aced a university maths course for the first time

 

“The social and self-related considerations – is my friend going to like this, will I look good when I share this – are integrated into the value system. They are the forces of this value. They inform our value calculations,” Scholz says.

So each time you read an article, your brain calculates the value of sharing or not sharing it, which then determines its virality – and it all happens pretty much unconsciously. The significance of the study, Scholz says, lies in its explanation of why we share.

“While a lot of different, very specific recommendations on how to make things viral are floating around in the world – for instance, make content emotional – our work shows that there are really two underlying motives to share, which are deeply rooted in core human nature: We share to connect to others and to present ourselves in a positive light.”

The most viral article in the study was titled “Gluten-Free, Whether You Need It or Not” with the summary “Avoiding gluten is a must for those with celiac disease, but many people are going gluten-free in a bid for a healthy diet.”

“It was shared 12,743 times within the first three months after it was published,” says Scholz.

Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the new study says, says he found the results interesting.

“As far as I know, it’s the first to use neuroimaging, specifically functional MRI, to try to predict virality of articles,” says Knutson, whose lab uses neural data to make predictions about choice, “more recent research has started to ask whether brain activity tells us something about population choices or aggregated choices at the market level.”

“One of the earliest examples was listening to music,” he says, “researchers looked at teenagers listening to music, and then two years later they looked at the song downloads, and brain activity in some of the same value regions was able to predict which songs would get the most downloads.”

The new study, he says, implies that neural data could soon be used as a tool to predict what consumers want.

 

RELATED
Saudi Arabia reveal plans for a 100 mile long car free city called "The Line"

 

The brain activity in the new study seemed to predict virality even when subjects didn’t report that they would typically share the article themselves.

“The implication is that there is something that people know about virality, or what is shared by the larger population, that is unconscious and not accessible to them,” says Scholz, “neuroimaging allows us to measure these processes in real time without people having to tell us explicitly.”

In future studies, Scholz and her colleagues will test different strategies intended to increase virality.

“This understanding of why we share now helps us to develop strategies to alter any content in ways that increase its likelihood to go viral,” she says, “the motives we identified affect most aspects of a person’s life and, although we only tested our model in the context of health news, these principles should also apply to other types of content.”

Thanks for reading. You’re great.

Related Posts

Comments (1)

Leave a comment

EXPLORE MORE!

1000's of articles about the exponential future, 1000's of pages of insights, 1000's of videos, and 100's of exponential technologies: Get The Email from 311, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in exponential technology and science.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This