How to Use Novelty to Create Contagious Ideas | Dan Zarella

Every time I’ve looked at the contagiousness of ideas, be it online or off, one of the most frequent characteristics I come across is novelty. I’ve found thatReTweets tend to contain less common words than normal Tweets, and I’ve found thatsurvey-takers highlight “news” as the most common type of content they share.

In 2007, researchers at the Hewlett-Packard’ s Information Dynamics Laboratory in Palo Altostudied social news site Digg and found that “novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.”

And Free University of Brussels research professor Francis Heylighenlists “novelty” as a criteria for a successful meme, saying “New, unusual or unexpected ideas or perceptions tend to attract the attention, and thus arouse the cognitive energy which will facilitate their assimilation.”

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In our everyday lives we are exposed to many more stimuli than we could ever hope to consciously digest, so our minds have evolved to include a sophisticated filtering mechanism by which our attention is drawn only to the important bits. This selective attention can be triggered by things like hearing our name over the noise of a loud party, or by a change in something familiar.