The Value of Sharing Information: A Neural Account of Information Transmission

Abstract

Humans routinely share information with one another. What drives this behavior? We used neuroimaging to test an account of information selection and sharing that emphasizes inherent reward in self-reflection and connecting with other people. Participants underwent functional MRI while they considered personally reading and sharing New York Times articles. Activity in neural regions involved in positive valuation, self-related processing, and taking the perspective of others was significantly associated with decisions to select and share articles, and scaled with preferences to do so. Activity in all three sets of regions was greater when participants considered sharing articles with other people rather than selecting articles to read themselves. The findings suggest that people may consider value not only to themselves but also to others even when selecting news articles to consume personally. Further, sharing heightens activity in these pathways, in line with our proposal that humans derive value from self-reflection and connecting to others via sharing.

Keywords: cognitive processes; mass media; neuroimaging; open materials; social behavior; social interaction.

Fig. 1.

The functionally defined regions of interest (ROIs) used in the ROI analysis. The ROIs are the white areas outlined in black.

Fig. 2.

Illustration of the trial sequence in the article task. Participants were first reminded of the condition of the trial (a trial in the select-to-read condition is shown here). Then they saw (and heard an audio recording of) an article headline and abstract. This was followed by a jittered intratrial interval (M = 1.5 s). Finally, they were given 3 s to respond to a question, which was determined by the condition of the trial.

Fig. 3.

Estimates of percentage signal change in the subjective-valuation, self-related-processing, and social-cognition regions of interest, separately for the select and share conditions. Activation in each of these conditions was measured in contrast to activation in the content condition. The sagittal and axial cuts of the brain represent the regions of interest (white areas outlined in black). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Fig. 4.

Results of the whole-brain analysis. The color coding indicates regions where, from left to right, the select > content, share > content, and share > select contrasts revealed significant activations ( p < .05, corrected for family-wise error; minimum cluster size = 20 voxels). See Table 2 for a detailed breakdown of the clusters, and see Figures S1 through S3 in the Supplemental Material for complete sets of sagittal slices illustrating these results.

Fig. 5.

Brain images showing regions where the whole-brain analysis indicated that neural activity in the select (left) and share (right) conditions was modulated by preference ratings.