EXPRESS: Concrete language enhances sharing of social media posts on Twitter, Reddit, and experimentally

Concrete language, which has the property of readily evoking a mental image or sensory experience, has been extensively studied in language and is understood to facilitate processing speed, memory, and understanding. Previous research points to a preference for concreteness. Through a comprehensive approach that combines big-data analysis and experimental methods, we investigate the preference for concreteness in posts from two social media platforms—Twitter and Reddit—and in decisions made by participants in a two-alternative forced-choice experiment. In Study 1, we analyzed data from 15 million Twitter posts. The overall results show that posts containing words that are more concrete are more likely to be retweeted. In Study 2, we scraped over 50 thousand posts from Reddit across different subreddits and found that more concrete posts tend to have more upvotes (i.e., approval). Both studies also showed consistent effects for words acquired later in life and rated as more arousing. The magnitude of these effects varied across topics. Finally, to demonstrate the causal influence of concreteness, Study 3 is a pre-registered, controlled behavioral experiment where we asked participants to indicate which of two social media posts they would be more likely to share, with both posts constructed from a real post to have either higher or lower concreteness than the original. Participants preferred more-concrete statements, and the difference in concreteness between statements positively predicted choices. Our investigation sheds light on cognitive mechanisms underlying online information sharing and is consistent with an information competition theory, in which more easily processed information is preferred.