Self- and social relevance and the perceived value of sharing
Which psychological drivers of sharing should be targeted? Prior work relying on self-report produced important insights (Functional neuroimaging has proven useful in supplementing self-reports to predict real-world behaviors (In the context of online sharing, neuroimaging studies found robust correlations between brain activity during content exposure and sharing intentions in study participants (Integrating these correlational neuroimaging studies with the existing theorizing about brain function, sharing and motivation psychology informed the value-based model of sharing (To determine whether sharing is a good idea (‘valuable’), a would-be sharer may consider, among others, whether sharing reflects positively on them and improves/maintains their social relationships. This is consistent with the work in motivation psychology and the work on sharing in communication science and marketing. Motivations to connect positively with others (The current study makes two important contributions. First, neuroimaging work shows that simple tasks that trigger self-related, social and value-related thoughts (e.g. evaluating whether personality traits describe ‘me’ or indicating willingness to pay for some stimulus) engage regions in which activity also correlates with sharing (e.g. This pre-registered study (There will be a main effect of our mechanism-driven manipulation targeting how would-be sharers think about to-be-shared content on neural activity in brain ROIs that are meta-analytically associated with self-related, social and value-related cognition so that neural activity will be higher inthe social relevance the self-relevance Research question: are there differences in ROI activity or whole-brain activity when comparing the self- and social relevance conditions?Self-reported sharing likelihood and perceived benefits of sharing will be higher inthe social relevance the social relevance Research question: are there differences in sharing likelihood and perceived benefits of sharing between the self- and social relevance conditions?