The Psychology of Shareability

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The New York Times wanted to understand why some content spreads and other content dies. In 2011, they surveyed 2,500 heavy sharers across platforms and asked them directly: why do you share?

Sharing isn't about the content at all. It's about the sharer. Every share is an act of self-curation, a way for people to construct their identity in public.

This reveals the fundamental misunderstanding most of us make. We optimise content for value when we should optimise for identity signal.

Your audience isn't asking "is this valuable?" They're asking "does sharing this make me look smart, helpful, early, or aligned with something I care about?"

This is the psychology of shareability. And it changes everything about how you create content.

You've created something genuinely useful. Well-researched. Beautifully formatted. Comprehensive, clear, actionable.

And it sits there collecting dust.

The value paradox is real. High-quality content often doesn't get shared, not because it lacks quality, but because it lacks social currency.

There's a gap between "good" and "shareable" that most content never bridges. We optimise for comprehensiveness, clarity, and actionability. All important. But none of it matters if sharing your content doesn't serve the sharer.

Content without an identity signal is content without shares.

Your content might be ammunition, but is it the right ammunition for someone else's personal brand?

All sharing is a transaction. Not an altruistic act.

Before someone hits share, they unconsciously ask three questions:

If your content doesn't clearly answer at least one of these, it won't get shared. The calculation happens in milliseconds, but it always happens.

Look at how brands engineer this.

Oatly's conversational packaging does more than just inform, it creates insider language. Sharing Oatly signals "I get it, I'm not basic, I value sustainability".

Buffer's radical transparency about salaries and metrics gives people ammunition to signal their values.

Supreme made things deliberately difficult, turning scarcity into social currency for those in the know.

These brands created more than just “value”, they created value people wanted associated with themselves.

Jonah Berger analysed 7,000 New York Times articles to understand what made content spread. His finding adds another layer to the selfishness framework.

High-arousal emotions drive sharing. Awe, excitement, anger, anxiety. Low-arousal emotions suppress it. Contentment, sadness.

What matters isn't whether the emotion is positive or negative. What matters is activation.

This explains why calm, informative content often fails despite being valuable. Low arousal. And why controversial hot takes work even when people disagree with them. High arousal.

But here's where it connects to identity. The content that gets shared makes people feel something strong enough to act, and that emotional response becomes part of what they're signaling. The NYTimes study found that 94% of people carefully consider how the content reflects on them before hitting share. They're not just thinking “does this make me look good?” They're thinking “does this make me look good by being useful to them?” The generosity is real, but it's also the mechanism through which identity gets signalled. The emotion needs to be identity-compatible, expressed through genuine value.

You can't share angry content if your personal brand is "calm expert". You can't share earnest, heartfelt content if your brand is "provocative contrarian". The arousal has to align with how people want to be seen. Emotional intensity creates the impulse to share, but identity determines whether they actually do it.

Most advice about shareable content focuses on format. "Use these hooks." "Try carousel posts." "Lead with a question."

Format is downstream of function.

You can master every tactic and still fail if the underlying insight isn't shareable. If sharing your content doesn't enhance someone's identity, no hook will save it.

In that sense, the real shift isn't about tactics at all. Instead of asking “how would people sharing this be valuable for me?” it becomes about asking "how would people sharing this by valuable for them?"

The NYTimes study found that 73% of people share to process information more deeply. Sharing forces them to articulate why something matters, which means your content needs to be worth articulating. But when content doesn't get shared it’s often more to do with alignment than quality. Every piece of unshared content is your audience saying "this doesn't help me signal what I want to signal".

Your audience is selfish. So are you. So am I. So is everyone.

We share content that makes us look good. That reinforces our identity. That gives us social currency. That helps us signal our values to the people who matter to us.

This isn't a criticism. It's human nature. Once you accept it, everything about content creation changes.

You stop wondering why your "best" work gets ignored while something you dashed off in 10 minutes goes viral. You stop blaming the algorithm or the platform or your audience's attention span. You start asking better questions. Not "is this valuable?" but "does sharing this make them look good?"

The brands that win at shareability create content that people want to be associated with. Content that enhances the sharer's identity rather than just delivering information.

Your content can do more than just compete for attention. It can become ammunition for someone else's personal brand.

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