2016/05/13 by Kristina Lerman · 72 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computer science #Data science #Empirical research #Internet privacy #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Popularity #Population #Psychology #Social media #Social psychology #Sociology #World Wide Web
paper · pdf · doi:10.3390/fi8020021
published in Future Internet 8(2), 21 (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)
openalex publication_date 2016/05/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The many decisions that people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence, the position of information in an individual’s social feed, as well as explicit social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus through a population.