BLACKSBURG, Va., July 16 -- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued the following news release:
People are naturally attracted to excitement.
According to new Virginia Tech research, the same is true on social media, where feeds are overrun with international travels, skydiving, and other experiences that may seem out of the ordinary.
When social media users constantly are shown rare and unique events, they overestimate how often those occur and seek to share their own. This unbalanced content stream creates a "rareness bias diffusion." This new concept by Alice Jang, assistant professor, and Viswanath Venkatesh, the Verizon Chair of Business Information Technology, both in the Pamplin College of Business, defines that...