#Economists vs Social Scientists

Our new preprint explains why social media creates a funhouse mirror--a distorted perception of social norms. Because extreme voices dominate discourse on most topics, users develop a false sense of shared norms osf.io/preprints/psya… Led by @CRobertson500 @KareenadelRosa

For those going to #ISA2024, come join us on Friday @ 4 PM as we celebrate the life and legacy of the incomparable Bear Braumoeller, the recipient of this year's SSIP Distinguished Scholar Award Aisha Bradshaw Deborah Avant Sara Mitchell Drew Rosenberg Maryum Alam OSU Polisci ISA

🚨New article out at American Behavioral Scientist with Juergen Maier TLDR: exposure to negative & uncivil political messages drives affective polarization upwards, especially among voters with populist attitudes Open access: tinyurl.com/bdhhm3nd Replication data: osf.io/pk5tc/

Does populism fuel affective polarization? Juan Pérez Rajó analyses panel data to examine the causal relationship between populism and affective polarization. Read in Political Studies: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00… @SAGECQPolitics Political Studies Association #Manicheism #polsci

Social media is a collective trap: Users feel compelled to stay engaged, even if they hate it. The majority of people would prefer to live in a world without Tik Tok or Instagram (which currently have 3.5 billion users). Indeed, nearly 60% of Instagram users wish the platform

Recent nature paper: "even though extremely toxic users are rare, the relationship between participation and toxicity of a discussion may in principle be affected also by small groups of highly toxic and engaged users driving the conversation dynamics" nature.com/articles/s4158…

📢Excited to share our new paper in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review with @roozenbot & Sander van der Linden📢 We explore the effectiveness of gamified #inoculation in reducing susceptibility to #misinformation from politically congenial outlets🎮 misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gamifi…

Social media rewards extremism A group representing only 6-7% of Americans provide most of the likes & RTs to Senators’ tweets. This group is ideologically extreme and creates false norms. Don’t infer public opinion from social media, folks!

I was reading 2023 Nobel laureate Katalin Kariko's book, Breaking Through. She was brutally honest about the academic system in US. And, here is an example section from her book.

🖥️Digital tech enables selective #news consumption, reducing encounters & civic engagement. Yet, this research shows it boosts political engagement. 📚tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… By Drs. Sung Woo Yoo & Homero Gil de Zúñiga APSA ITP APSA APSA & ICA Political Communication Divisions

New publication in Journal of Applied Social Psychology "Misinformation interventions decay rapidly without an immediate posttest" doi.org/10.1111/jasp.1… Key finding: * Misinformation detection trainings need to integrate a "testing phase" * Otherwise: rapid decay (1/6)

The 2012 & 2016 pres debates involved a zero-sum fight for attention on #Twitter, yet resulted in different dynamics. Romney & Obama were locked in a digital tug-of-war, while Trump largely overshadowed Clinton. Jo(sephine) Lukito UT Austin School of Journalism and Media #Debates2024 ➡️tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

A sneak peek for all you fans of spies and spy history! Out May 1, 2025 with Oxford Academic:

Social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification—virality Virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expression. psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-57…

More time watching partisan content on YouTube means less hard news knowledge and more soft news knowledge for most viewers. However, the inverse is true for those more adept at consuming media with a critical lens. Yonsei University tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

An analysis of ~30M tweets by @knutson_brain et al. found that: -Biased news sources post more content containing high-arousal negative emotions (e.g., anger, outrage) -High-arousal negative content is more likely to go viral -The link between high-arousal negative content and

This X algorithm is essentially designed to shadowban links to original sources. When you talk about censorship, please understand that it is already baked into every algorithm—often in stupid ways. This is such a shitty platform design feature.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

At the end of the Biden presidency, it's striking that Obama and W Bush had higher approval *at every point* of their first years in office. Suggests something structural and new is also weighing on Biden's approval.