Exploring the Effect of Social Media Popularity Metrics on Curiosity
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Date
2022
Authors
Waldron, Erica
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Social media inundates us with information about popularity; for example, social media posts are accompanied by a count of “likes” as well as comments. Dubey and colleagues (2020) recently demonstrated that such indicators of popularity influence people’s curiosity to learn more about specific topics. If so, this is one unexpected, beneficial side effect of social media popularity metrics. However, the way in which they manipulated popularity via Reddit-like upvotes may have inadvertently introduced a confound into their findings. Specifically, people were asked to report about an item’s popularity immediately before reporting on their curiosity regarding that item. The immediate juxtaposition of these two questions may have led participants to assume that popularity was relevant to curiosity, thereby creating a demand characteristic that could have contaminated their findings. My thesis research attempts to replicate that of Dubey and colleagues’ while avoiding this potential demand characteristic. People rated curiosity first and were asked about popularity only at the end of the survey. Analyses modeled after Dubey et al. (2020) indicate that I partially replicated their findings. That is, when accuracy in recalling item popularity is considered, people are indeed more curious about items with a high number of upvotes than those with a low number of upvotes. These findings confirm that indicators of popularity can elicit curiosity, which sets the stage for deploying popularity as a curiosity-trigger in a range of possible contexts, such as in curiosity research and educational settings.
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Keywords
Curiosity, Social Media, Popularity, Dwell-Time