Abstract

Information transmission can shift social norms and catalyze social change. What motivates people to share content and information and how might these motives be leveraged to promote sharing? Neural and behavioral research suggests self-related and social motives drive sharing behavior, but have rarely tested causal links, cross-cultural generalizability, or considered translational methods to promote sharing through these mechanisms. We address these gaps by experimentally manipulating self-related and social motives during content exposure to increase sharing. Instead of tailoring content to increase shareability, we applied a framing intervention that prompts individuals to identify why content is relevant to themselves (self-relevance) or people they know (social relevance). Across a preregistered, cross-cultural fMRI study and two behavioral studies, we observed positive correlations among self-reported self and social relevance, activity in self-referential and mentalizing brain regions, and sharing intentions. The framing intervention increased activity in hypothesized brain regions, but was only effective when participants engaged more deeply with the prompts through writing. These relationships were consistent in Dutch and American samples, and across different content domains (news abstracts about health and climate), highlighting generalizability across contexts. We replicated the behavioral relationships in an online field experiment with a more naturalistic content exposure environment, and found preliminary evidence that they extend beyond intentions to actual sharing behavior. These findings provide important causal evidence that self-related and social motives drive people to share content, and demonstrate that these motives can be activated efficiently through framing interventions targeting self and social relevance, without tailoring the content itself.