Social Relevance in Strong and Weak Ties
The Science Daily article, “What makes us share posts on social media?”, describes a University of Pennsylvania study that examined the motivation behind sharing social media posts. Researchers, Danielle Cosme and Emily Falk, discovered people pay more attention to information they perceive is relevant to themselves. When sharing information, human stimulate the brain’s reward center and evaluate social relevance, the concept of what they think someone is thinking or wants to hear. In the study, participants read headlines, articles, or social media posts on social topics, such as climate change, voting, and health and indicated how likely they were to share the message, in addition to rating the topic’s relevance to them and the people they knew. Participants demonstrated they were most likely to share messages they considered self or socially relevant, regardless of the medium or topic. The authors of the study hope to use the findings to curate more effective social media posts that pertain to public messaging of social issues.
The topic of sharing information relates to strong and weak ties. More specifically, it strengthens Mark Granovetter’s study about finding a new job through weak connections. In a social network, interactions between nodes, or people, can be classified as strong or weak ties to indicate how familiar or close one may be to another person. Cosme and Falk’s study reveals that people are more likely to share information that they believe is relatable to people in their community or network. Suppose a network where each node is connected to all other nodes in the network by an edge and they all have strong ties. With social relevance, nodes will tailor to their network’s collective interests. If every person in that network only shares information relating to a common topic, overlap of information will occur and novel information beyond the scope of a similar interest cannot be relayed. If one person in the network aims to transition into a new job, they would be less likely to find the opportunity within their own community. Their industry may not be socially relevant, they themselves may not perceive this action to be significant in their group, or because everyone only provides information related to their or social network’s interest, they have limited access to new insights. Therefore, that node is more likely to find a job through someone with a weak tie, outside of their local group that has access to other irrelevant information to the node’s network, but relevant to the initial node itself. In comparison, social issues that can apply to large groups, a node in the network can use the advantage of social relevance to convey this information.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220825164005.htm
University of Pennsylvania. (2022, August 25). What makes us share posts on social media?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 28, 2022 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220825164005.htm