Feelings and Perspective Matter: Sharing of Crisis Information in Social Media

Why do people spread disaster-related news in social media? To address this question, we analyzed people´s tendency to share information discussing the Great East Japan Earthquake and the feelings that they experienced after reading the information in three conditions: when they were asked to think about themselves in a disaster center, when they were asked to think about another person, John, in a disaster center, and when they were not asked to take any perspective. A previous work showed that people who imagined themselves in a disaster center, Fukushima, Japan, were more likely to share related information. We successfully replicated the previous work and extended it by suggesting that feelings could predict the likelihood of information sharing. In this paper, we reported our new findings, proposed a model of information sharing during disaster response, and provided practical implications for advancing the effective use of social media technologies for crises management.