What Gets Shared, and Why? Interpersonal Communication and Word of Mouth.

Interpersonal communication is an integral part of everyday life. People are constantly sharing thoughts, opinions, and information with others, both online and offline. Further, such social sharing has important implications for what people think, buy, and do. However, while it is clear that interpersonal communication is both frequent and important, research is only starting to understand what people share and why. This article reviews the literature on interpersonal communication and word of mouth, focusing on the drivers of social transmission and the implications for individuals and society at large. It discusses how factors like audiences, modalities (e.g., speaking or writing), channels (e.g., email or text), and devices (e.g., phone or PC) moderate what gets shared, and it outlines areas that deserve further attention. Such areas include the diffusion of false information, conversations and conversational dynamics, and how automated textual analysis can be used to shed light on a range of interesting questions.

The topography of thought.

Whether speaking, writing, or thinking, almost everything humans do involves language. But can the semantic structure behind how people express their ideas shed light on their future success? Natural language processing of over 40,000 college application essays finds that students whose writing covers more semantic ground, while moving more slowly (i.e. moving between more semantically similar ideas), end up doing better academically (i.e. have a higher college grade point average). These relationships hold controlling for dozens of other factors (e.g. SAT score, parents' education, and essay content), suggesting that essay topography encodes information that goes beyond family background. Overall, this work sheds light on how language reflects thought, demonstrates that how people express themselves can provide insight into their future success, and provides a systematic, scalable, and objective method for quantifying the topography of thought.

Quantifying cultural change: Gender bias in music.

Cultural items (e.g., songs, books, and movies) have an important impact in creating and reinforcing stereotypes. But the actual nature of such items is often less transparent. Take songs, for example. Are lyrics biased against women, and how have any such biases changed over time? Natural language processing of a quarter of a million songs quantifies gender bias in music over the last 50 years. Women are less likely to be associated with desirable traits (i.e., competence), and while this bias has decreased, it persists. Ancillary analyses further suggest that song lyrics may contribute to shifts in collective attitudes and stereotypes toward women, and that lyrical shifts are driven by male artists (as female artists were less biased to begin with). Overall, these results shed light on cultural evolution, subtle measures of bias and discrimination, and how natural language processing and machine learning can provide deeper insight into stereotypes, cultural change, and a range of psychological questions more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Seeing your life story as a Hero's Journey increases meaning in life.

Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., Beowulf) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., Harry Potter). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and can causally increase people's experience of meaning in life. We first distill the Hero's Journey into seven key elements-protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy-and then develop a new measure that assesses the perceived presence of the Hero's Journey narrative in people's life stories: the Hero's Journey Scale. Using this scale, we find a positive relationship between the Hero's Journey and meaning in life with both online participants (Studies 1-2) and older adults in a community sample (Study 3). We then develop a restorying intervention that leads people to see the events of their life as a Hero's Journey (Study 4). This intervention causally increases meaning in life (Study 5) by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connecting them into a coherent and compelling narrative (Study 6). This Hero's Journey restorying intervention also increases the extent to which people perceive meaning in an ambiguous grammar task (Study 7) and increases their resilience to life's challenges (Study 8). These results provide initial evidence that enduring cultural narratives like the Hero's Journey both reflect meaningful lives and can help to create them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Catalyzing social change: Does concentration encourage action?

Countless social problems demand solutions, from climate change and gun control to poverty and systemic racism. But while some of these problems inspire action (e.g., "Black Lives Matter" and "Me Too" movements), most fail to gain traction or inspire new policy. Why do some problems garner more attention and response? We suggest that the relative timing of related events may play an important role. Specifically, action may be more likely when related events are concentrated in time. A multi-method investigation tests this possibility. Study 1 borrows a modeling strategy from the economics and marketing literatures to examine a particularly important domain: gun control. Analysis of over 40 years of gun control legislation finds that, even after controlling for the frequency of mass shootings, bills are more likely to be proposed (and passed) when shootings are concentrated in time. Study 2 further tests concentration's causal impact and demonstrates that concentration increases support against sexual assault. These findings illustrate how a modeling approach commonly used to study advertising goodwill can be applied to a broader set of situations, suggest why some social problems are more likely to catalyze action, and shed light on drivers of social movements and collective action.

The speed of stories: Semantic progression and narrative success.

Why are some narratives more successful? Although this question has ancient roots, studying it empirically has been challenging. We suggest that semantic progression (i.e., semantic similarity between adjoining portions of a narrative) might shape audience responses but that this role changes over the course of a narrative. Specifically, although slower semantic progression (i.e., greater semantic similarity between adjoining portions) is beneficial at the beginning of narratives, faster semantic progression is beneficial toward the end. To test this possibility, we used natural language processing and machine learning to analyze over 40,000 movie scripts. Consistent with our theorizing, deep-learning-based embeddings find that movies with slower semantic progression early and faster semantic progression later are evaluated more positively. Analysis of over 10,000 TV episodes finds similar results. Overall, these findings shed light on what makes narratives engaging, deepen understanding of what drives cultural success, and underscore the value of emerging computational approaches to understand human behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Using natural language processing to understand people and culture.

Language can provide important insights into people, and culture more generally. Further, the digitization of information has made more and more textual data available. But by itself, all that data are just that: data. Realizing its potential requires turning that data into insight. We suggest that automated text analysis can help. Recent advances have provided novel and increasingly accessible ways to extract insight from text. While some psychologists may be familiar with dictionary methods, fewer may be aware of approaches like topic modeling, word embeddings, and more advanced neural network language models. This article provides an overview of natural language processing and how it can be used to deepen understanding of people and culture. We outline the dual role of language (i.e., reflecting things about producers and impacting audiences), review some useful text analysis methods, and discuss how these approaches can help unlock a range of interesting questions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

How quantifying the shape of stories predicts their success.

Narratives, and other forms of discourse, are powerful vehicles for informing, entertaining, and making sense of the world. But while everyday language often describes discourse as moving quickly or slowly, covering a lot of ground, or going in circles, little work has actually quantified such movements or examined whether they are beneficial. To fill this gap, we use several state-of-the-art natural language-processing and machine-learning techniques to represent texts as sequences of points in a latent, high-dimensional semantic space. We construct a simple set of measures to quantify features of this semantic path, apply them to thousands of texts from a variety of domains (i.e., movies, TV shows, and academic papers), and examine whether and how they are linked to success (e.g., the number of citations a paper receives). Our results highlight some important cross-domain differences and provide a general framework that can be applied to study many types of discourse. The findings shed light on why things become popular and how natural language processing can provide insight into cultural success.

Thinking of You: How Second-Person Pronouns Shape Cultural Success.

Why do some cultural items succeed and others fail? Some scholars have argued that one function of the narrative arts is to facilitate feelings of social connection. If this is true, cultural items that activate personal connections should be more successful. The present research tested this possibility in the context of second-person pronouns. We argue that rather than directly addressing the audience, communicating norms, or encouraging perspective taking, second-person pronouns can encourage audiences to think of someone in their own lives. Textual analysis of songs ranked in the Billboard charts (N = 4,200), as well as controlled experiments (total N = 2,921), support this possibility, demonstrating that cultural items that use more second-person pronouns are liked and purchased more. These findings demonstrate a novel way in which second-person pronouns make meaning, how pronouns' situated use (object case vs. subject case) may shape this meaning, and how psychological factors shape the success of narrative arts.

How the voice persuades.

Research has examined persuasive language, but relatively little is known about how persuasive people are when they attempt to persuade through paralanguage, or acoustic properties of speech (e.g., pitch and volume). People often detect and react against what communicators say, but might they be persuaded by speakers' attempts to modulate how they say it? Four experiments support this possibility, demonstrating that communicators engaging in paralinguistic persuasion attempts (i.e., modulating their voice to persuade) naturally use paralinguistic cues that influence perceivers' attitudes and choice. Rather than being effective because they go undetected, however, the results suggest a subtler possibility. Even when they are detected, paralinguistic attempts succeed because they make communicators seem more confident without undermining their perceived sincerity. Consequently, speakers' confident vocal demeanor persuades others by serving as a signal that they more strongly endorse the stance they take in their message. Further, we find that paralinguistic approaches to persuasion can be uniquely effective even when linguistic ones are not. A cross-study exploratory analysis and replication experiment reveal that communicators tend to speak louder and vary their volume during paralinguistic persuasion attempts, both of which signal confidence and, in turn, facilitate persuasion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Are Atypical Things More Popular?

Why do some cultural items become popular? Although some researchers have argued that success is random, we suggest that how similar items are to each other plays an important role. Using natural language processing of thousands of songs, we examined the relationship between lyrical differentiation (i.e., atypicality) and song popularity. Results indicated that the more different a song's lyrics are from its genre, the more popular it becomes. This relationship is weaker in genres where lyrics matter less (e.g., dance) or where differentiation matters less (e.g., pop) and occurs for lyrical topics but not style. The results shed light on cultural dynamics, why things become popular, and the psychological foundations of culture more broadly.

Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation With Language.

Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurately predict the temporal orientation of new messages in a separate validation set (accuracy/mean sensitivity = .72; mean specificity = .77). We used the classifier to automatically classify 1.3 million messages written by 5,372 participants (50% female; ages 13-48). Finally, we tested whether individual differences in past, present, and future orientation differentially related to gender, age, Big Five personality, satisfaction with life, and depressive symptoms. Temporal orientations exhibit several expected correlations with age, gender, and Big Five personality. More future-oriented people were older, more likely to be female, more conscientious, less impulsive, less depressed, and more satisfied with life; present orientation showed the opposite pattern. Language-based assessments can complement and extend existing measures of temporal orientation, providing an alternative approach and additional insights into language and personality relationships.

Does Presentation Order Impact Choice After Delay?

Options are often presented incidentally in a sequence, but does serial position impact choice after delay, and if so, how? We address this question in a consequential real-world choice domain. Using 25 years of citation data, and a unique identification strategy, we examine the relationship between article order (i.e., position in a journal issue) and citation count. Results indicate that mere serial position affects the prominence that research achieves: Earlier-listed articles receive more citations. Furthermore, our identification strategy allows us to cast doubt on alternative explanations (i.e., editorial placement) and instead indicate that the effect is driven by psychological processes of attention and memory. These findings deepen the understanding of how presentation order impacts choice, suggest that subtle presentation factors can bias an important scientific metric, and shed light on how psychological processes shape collective outcomes.

Drivers of cultural success: The case of sensory metaphors.

Why do some cultural items catch on and become more popular than others? Language is one of the basic foundations of culture. But what leads some phrases to become more culturally successful? There are multiple ways to convey the same thing and phrases with similar meanings often act as substitutes, competing for usage. A not so friendly person, for example, can be described as unfriendly or cold. We study how the senses shape cultural success, suggesting that compared with their semantic equivalents (e.g., unfriendly person), phrases which relate to senses in metaphoric ways (e.g., cold person) should be more culturally successful. Data from 5 million books over 200 years support this prediction: Sensory metaphors are used more frequently over time than are their semantic equivalents. Experimental evidence demonstrates that sensory metaphors are more memorable because they relate more to the senses and have more associative cues. These findings shed light on how senses shape language and the psychological foundations of culture more broadly.

The science of sharing and the sharing of science.

Why do members of the public share some scientific findings and not others? What can scientists do to increase the chances that their findings will be shared widely among nonscientists? To address these questions, we integrate past research on the psychological drivers of interpersonal communication with a study examining the sharing of hundreds of recent scientific discoveries. Our findings offer insights into (i) how attributes of a discovery and the way it is described impact sharing, (ii) who generates discoveries that are likely to be shared, and (iii) which types of people are most likely to share scientific discoveries. The results described here, combined with a review of recent research on interpersonal communication, suggest how scientists can frame their work to increase its dissemination. They also provide insights about which audiences may be the best targets for the diffusion of scientific content.

From Karen to Katie: using baby names to understand cultural evolution.

How do psychological processes shape how culture evolves? We investigated how a cultural item's popularity is shaped by the recent popularity of other items with features in common. Specifically, using more than 100 years of first-names data, we examined how a name's popularity is influenced by the popularity of that name's component phonemes in other names in the previous year. Building on mere-exposure research, we found that names are more likely to become popular when similar names have been popular recently. These effects are nonlinear, however, and overpopularity hurts adoption. In addition, these effects vary with phoneme position. We demonstrate the causal impact of similarity on cultural success in a natural experiment using hurricane names. An exogenous shock to a phoneme's frequency, due to the presence of the phoneme in the names of prominent hurricanes, boosts the popularity of names that share that phoneme. Taken together, our results suggest how the similarity between cultural items affects how popular they become and how culture evolves more broadly.

How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes.

Products, styles, and social movements often catch on and become popular, but little is known about why such identity-relevant cultural tastes and practices die out. We demonstrate that the velocity of adoption may affect abandonment: Analysis of over 100 years of data on first-name adoption in both France and the United States illustrates that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (i.e., are less likely to persist). Mirroring this aggregate pattern, at the individual level, expecting parents are more hesitant to adopt names that recently experienced sharper increases in adoption. Further analysis indicate that these effects are driven by concerns about symbolic value: Fads are perceived negatively, so people avoid identity-relevant items with sharply increasing popularity because they believe that they will be short lived. Ancillary analyses also indicate that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, identity-relevant cultural products that are adopted quickly tend to be less successful overall (i.e., reduced cumulative adoption). These results suggest a potential alternate way to explain diffusion patterns that are traditionally seen as driven by saturation of a pool of potential adopters. They also shed light on one factor that may lead cultural tastes to die out.

Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup dissimilarity, and the abandonment of cultural tastes.

People often diverge from members of other social groups: They select cultural tastes (e.g., possessions, attitudes, or behaviors) that distinguish them from outsiders and abandon tastes when outsiders adopt them. But while divergence is pervasive, most research on the propagation of culture is based on conformity. Consequently, it is less useful in explaining why people might abandon tastes when others adopt them. The 7 studies described in this article showed that people diverge to avoid signaling undesired identities. A field study, for example, found that undergraduates stopped wearing a particular wristband when members of the "geeky" academically focused dormitory next door started wearing them. Consistent with an identity-signaling perspective, the studies further showed that people often diverge from dissimilar outgroups to avoid the costs of misidentification. Implications for social influence, identity signaling, and the popularity and diffusion of culture are discussed.

Contextual priming: where people vote affects how they vote.

American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were assigned to vote in schools were more likely to support a school funding initiative. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters' political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics of individuals living near schools. A follow-up experiment using random assignment suggests that priming underlies these effects, and that they can occur outside of conscious awareness. These findings underscore the subtle power of situational context to shape important real-world decisions.