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 concrete language. Is this preference visible in social media? Through a comprehensive approach that combines big-data analysis and experimental methods, we investigate the preference for concrete language in posts from two social media platforms—Twitter and Reddit—and with decisions made by participants in a two-alternative forced-choice experiment. In the first study, 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 the second study, we scraped over 50 thousand posts from Reddit across different subreddits and found that more concrete Reddit posts tend to have more upvotes (i.e., approval). Both studies also showed consistent effects for words that are acquired later in life, and are more arousing. The magnitude of these effects varied across topics. Finally, to demonstrate the causal influence of concreteness, we asked participants in an experimental study to indicate which of two social media posts they would be more likely to share, both artificially constructed from a real post to have either higher or lower concreteness than the original. Participants preferred more-concrete statements and the difference of concreteness between statements positively predicted choices. Our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying online information sharing across a variety of topics and is consistent with an information competition theory, in which more easily processed information is preferred.