Perspective Matters: Sharing of Crisis Information in Social Media

Abstract

In this paper, we examined information sharing behavior in social media when one was taking the perspective of self versus other. We found that imagining self in a disaster center, Fukushima, Japan, increased the likelihood of sharing crisis information relative to imagining another person, John, in the same place. People's intention to share crisis information by default, without being asked to take any perspective, paralleled the intention to share when taking another person's perspective. Moreover, when the information was associated with negative feelings, such as worry or fear, it was more likely to be shared; when the information was perceived confusing or uninteresting, it was less likely to be shared.

Questionnaire Testing: Identifying Twitter User's Information Sharing Behavior during Disasters

“…According to Chen [5], when people have negative feelings such as angry, nervous or worried, they tend to spread crisis information. Tanaka et al [6] stated that individual intends to transmit the tweet that they evaluate as more important regardless of the tweet type during disasters.…”

“…In an uncertain situation during disasters, not knowing whom and which information to trust raised an issue of information overload. Information credibility [1], [2], [3] and the spread of misinformation [4], [5], [6] are the problems of social media used during emergencies. Just after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Twitter is flooded with various information reporting self-experience, safety status, warning, fact, and also hoax messages [7], [8], [9].…”

“…On Twitter, information can continuously change from correct to incorrect due to retweeting timing [10]. Several studies in the literature highlight the potential of social media on misinformation and rumor transmission during emergencies [5], [6], [7], [11]. Misinformation may not only cause a delay in response and effort for emergency management rescue, but it also affect the public who want to know how they should prepare and react to the ambiguous situation happen around them.…”

“…Thus, this research is motivated by the need to understand user behavior of information diffusion on Twitter during disasters. Few research from psychology viewpoint investigated the relationship between anxiety, importance, distance and feelings with rumor transmission and crisis information sharing behavior in disaster situations [5], [12], [13]. However, several aspects such as the Twitter features, cognitive and trust factors which may influence one decision to spread disaster information are still vague.…”

psiTurk: An open-source framework for conducting replicable behavioral experiments online

“…In addition to large scale experiments such as those conducted by websites such as Facebook or Twitter (e.g., Chen & Sakamoto, 2013;Kramer et al, 2014 ;Wu et al, 2011), many researchers use online data collection to deploy "traditional" experimental psychology tasks. The benefit of the online versions of traditional behavioral experiments include faster data collection and access to a potentially more diverse pool of participants.…”