Rareness bias diffusion: Virginia Tech research explains our social media fix

How does social media drag us down so many rabbit holes? Virginia Tech researchers Alice Jang and Viswanath Venkatesh have coined a new term, “rareness bias diffusion,” explaining that when social media users are constantly shown rare and unique events, they overestimate how often those occur and seek to share their own.

“They think everyone else is traveling to Paris or doing something exciting, while they are just sitting at home doing mundane things,” Jang said. “It makes people feel like their lives are falling short, when in reality, everyone is mostly doing mundane things — they just only post the exciting parts.”

Hmmm, so that’s why posts about taking out the trash, sweeping the kitchen and cleaning the toilet aren’t all over the place.

Because that’s all mundane stuff.

We need to work on that, to normalize our perceptions.

We need to do that, but we won’t.

I like the dose of reality here – we all do boring stuff, and most of what all of us do is boring stuff, and if we can just come to understand that, we shouldn’t feel left out, because the people posting all the fun stuff they do are just sharing the highlights.

Now, they may have better highlights to share, but even so.

Research

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The researchers’ work on this was published in MIS Quarterly.

Jang and Venkatesh conducted six experiments to understand how people choose what to share online and their reaction to seeing rare content.

The researchers presented participants with fictional scenarios of a dystopian city under attack by various monsters – something unique that people would probably share online.

The participants were shown some scenarios more than others. In the end, they were more likely to share the scenario that they had seen the least.

This would seem to reinforce the idea that people are more likely to share content that is unique, rare or out of the ordinary.

“There is a bias that we simply cannot fix. It’s impossible to fix,” Jang said. “A lot of the prior literature just disregards this fact and assumes that people are rational”

Venkatesh added, “Yes, it’s a bias, but when people know this, they could perhaps know that what we are seeing on social media is others’ highlight reel and not the day-to-day life. This may reduce harmful negative impacts on oneself.”