Impact of repeated exposures on information spreading in social networks
Open accessAbstract
Clustered structure of social networks provides the chances of repeated exposures to carriers with similar information. It is commonly believed that the impact of repeated exposures on the spreading of information is nontrivial. Does this effect increase the probability that an individual forwards a message in social networks? If so, to what extent does this effect influence people's decisions on whether or not to spread information? Based on a large-scale microblogging data set, which logs the message spreading processes and users' forwarding activities, we conduct a data-driven analysis to explore the answer to the above questions. The results show that an overwhelming majority of message samples are more probable to be forwarded under repeated exposures, compared to those under only a single exposure. For those message samples that cover various topics, we observe a relatively fixed, topic-independent multiplier of the willingness of spreading when repeated exposures occur, regardless of the differences in network structure. We believe that this finding reflects average people's intrinsic psychological gain under repeated stimuli. Hence, it makes sense that the gain is associated with personal response behavior, rather than network structure. Moreover, we find that the gain is robust against the change of message popularity. This finding supports that there exists a relatively fixed gain brought by repeated exposures. Based on the above findings, we propose a parsimonious model to predict the saturated numbers of forwarding activities of messages. Our work could contribute to better understandings of behavioral psychology and social media analytics.
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- Authors
- Zhou, C., Zhao, Q., & Lu, W.
- Affiliations
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Zhao, Qianchuan
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-10-14
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- e0140556
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4605739
- OpenAlex
- W2337308032
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 1.05
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (61425027)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- repeated exposure, information dissemination, message forwarding, social networks, microblogging, forwarding behavior, social media analytics
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Computer Simulation, Humans, Models, Theoretical, Information Dissemination, Social Networking
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