Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits

By Kristina Lerman. 2016

75 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Nazanin Alipourfard
2. Peter G. Fennell
3. Kristina Lerman

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Nazanin Alipourfard
2. Peter G. Fennell
3. Kristina Lerman

Citations in the corpus

• Can you Trust the Trend?: Discovering Simpson's Paradoxes in Social Data (2018, background): “In fact, this is not the case, and instead, additional exposures monotonically increase the user’s likelihood to share information with followers [16].”
• Computational social scientist beware: Simpson’s paradox in behavioral data (2017, background): “In fact, the opposite is true: additional exposures monotonically increase the user’s likelihood to share information with followers [16].”