FROM SCROLL TO SHARE: DECODING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The rapid evolution of the social media platforms has transformed the information flow in the virtual world radically. Viral contents, i.e. ones that reach the millions of people within several hours, are no longer a coincidence, but a symptom of extremely well established psychological mechanisms of human activity on the Internet. The paper will address psychological underpinnings of content virality on the social media with the idea of solving the mystery of why certain posts, videos, and campaigns go viral and others do not. The research applies the templates of STEPPS model (Berger, 2013), the Social Contagion Theory (Goldenberg and Gross, 2020) and the Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (Brewer, 1991) to the stimuli that trigger mass sharing behavior using the systematic review and the synthesis of the peer-reviewed articles and credible online researches. The findings reveal that the most effective factors that drive viral sharing are high-arousal emotions, awe in particular followed by humor and moral elevation, and social identity alignment and platform-native design are right behind them. The study does not only offer a multi-framework synthesis of articles about sharing behavior, but also offers strategic recommendations that digital marketing, brand managers, and platform developers can adhere to, so that they too could be able to design viral content in an effective and ethical manner in the already existing attention economy. The keywords that could be applied include Virality, Social Media Psychology, STEPPS Framework, Emotional Contagion, Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Sharing Behavior. 1 Introduction The social media has fundamentally altered its sources of information propagation that has produced the virality as content exits its target audience and spreads exponentially that in most instances reaches millions of viewers in hours. There are more than 5.2 billion social media users worldwide, however, the huge number of 500 million or so daily tweets, as well as the billion and one billion daily uploads of videos on Tik Tok, are not naturally trending (DataReportal, 2024). Viral content is interesting and thus, exposes sub and psychological needs and attracts to specific emotional drivers and motivators, and may not be only because of algorithm success. Business consequences are great. The ALS Ice Bucket trend reached a hundred and fifty-nine million dollars of donated money by sharing that was entirely user-driven in just eight weeks, which was entirely user-based (Pressgrove, McKeever & Jang, 2018). Spotify Wrapped generated 73.7 billion views on one hashtag on Tik Tok in 2023 ( Clemso University, 2025). Relying on the implementation of the sharing psychology, influencer marketing is a market worth 21 billion today, globally (Statista, 2024). In the wake of this business need, no uniform framework is behind success and failure of structurally analogous content going viral. Such gap is addressed in this paper through a systematic review of the literature of secondary research and a multi-framework analysis.