Decision-making about broad- and narrowcasting: a neuroscientific perspective

Abstract

What differentiates sharing with few, well-defined others (narrowcasting) from sharing with loosely defined crowds (broadcasting)? One possibility involves a trade-off where broadcasting is selffocused and self-serving, and narrowcasting is based on otheroriented, altruistic motives. We present neuroimaging data consistent with a second, parallel-processes perspective. According to this account, both narrow-and broadcasting simultaneously involve self-related and social motives since these concepts are strongly intertwined both on a psychological and neural level. We recorded brain activity within regions that are meta-analytically associated with self-related and social cognition while participants made decisions to narrow-or broadcast New York Times articles on social media. Results show increased involvement of brain regions associated with both self-related and social processing in narrowand broadcasting, compared to a control condition. However, both processes were involved with higher intensity during narrowcasting, compared to broadcasting. These data help to disambiguate a theoretical discussion in communication science and clarify the neuropsychological mechanisms that drive sharing decisions in different contexts. Specifically, we highlight that narrow-and broadcasting afford differing intensities of two psychological processes that are crucial to persuasion and population-level content virality.

Media content sharing as a value-based decision

“…Context effects have also been found in the study of sharing decisions. For instance, the size of a sharer's potential audience impacts the extent to which brain regions, known to be important in sharing decisions, are engaged during decisions about news sharing [7]. Further, while making sharing decisions about news articles, participants wo identified as avid news readers showed greater functional connectivity between the neural valuation system and brain areas often associated with deliberate/effortful processing [57].…”

“…As this example illustrates, when deciding whether to share media content with others, potential sharers usually integrate at least two types of information, namely information about the media content itself [4,5] (e.g. its credibility, relevance, or usefulness) and about relevant social influences, including perceived social norms or opinions expressed by peers, for instance those the content could be shared with [6,7]. For Anna, integrating two such inherently incomparable inputs to decide what information to share is akin to comparing proverbial apples and oranges.…”

The Neuroscience of Information Sharing

“…More broadly, as briefly mentioned before, an important information characteristic is whether it originates from mass media or interpersonal sources (corresponding to differ ent steps in the propagation chain shown in Figure 16.1). Communication scientists have demonstrated that information sources can differ in trustworthiness and persuasiveness (Hesse et al, 2005;Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955), among other characteristics, (p. 299) and work on the diffusion of innovations suggests that the relative importance of mass media and interpersonal sources may vary over time (Rogers, 2010). Indeed, there is a compli cated interplay between mass media broadcasts and interpersonal communication, involv ing both mediating and moderating relationships (Southwell & Yzer, 2007;van den Putte, Yzer, Southwell, de Bruijn, & Willemsen, 2011).…”

“…Finally, cultural characteristics are known to affect social interactions as well as the flow of information in numerous ways (e.g., Rogers, 2010;Triandis, 2001), yet the neural mechanisms of sharing have almost exclusively been studied in American college stu dents. To provide an example of a possible hypothesis, in cultures with more independent self-construals that emphasize the individual over the group (Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 1991), sharers might rely less on perceived social outcomes when estimating in formation-sharing value than do sharers in collectivistic cultures, which emphasize groups over individuals.…”

Being the Gatekeeper: How Thinking about Sharing Affects Neural Encoding of Information

“…2010 ) and that making sharing decisions intensifies the activations of these brain areas ( Baek et al. 2017 ; Scholz et al. 2020 ).…”