Title:Robust Persuasive Effect of Political Fact-Checking and Remaining Challenges Abstract:The proliferation of misinformation and the persistent gap in factual information among partisans represent significant concerns in contemporary U.S. politics. Fact-checking, a journalistic intervention aimed at verifying the accuracy of claims and information, is seen as a key strategy to address this issue. While early studies suggested a […]
Title: Metawisdom of the Crowd: How Choice Within Aided Decision Making Can Make Crowd Wisdom Robust Abstract: Quality information can improve individual judgments but make group decisions less accurate; if individuals attend to the same information, the predictive diversity that underlies crowd wisdom may be lost. We explore this tension within the context of decision support […]
Speaker: Scott E. Page (University of Michigan, Santa Fe Institute). (website) Title: Organizations and Cultural Coherence Abstract: I construct a mathematical framework to elucidate and analyze the interdependence between structural features of an organization and some of its cultural attributes. By the structure of an organization, I mean whether individual actions are assigned hierarchically, agreed upon through […]
Title: The brain in the social world: Integrating approaches from psychology, neuroscience, and social network analysis Abstract: This talk will cover work integrating theory and methods from psychology, neuroscience, and social network analysis to examine how people track, encode, and are influenced by the social networks that they inhabit. One set of studies tests if, when, […]
Title: Emotional Representation: Identifying the Characteristics and Consequences of Elected Officials Mirroring the Emotions of Their Constituents (with Christopher Stout, Gregory Leslie, and Elizabeth Schroeder) Abstract: In this study, we identify a previously overlooked component of representation, which we label ‘emotional representation.’ Emotional representation occurs when elected officials mirror the dominant emotional state of […]
ABSTRACT: Researchers who conduct population surveys face escalating costs and declining response rates, as they aim to collect data that is representative, trustworthy, and publishable. Sample recruitment is often prohibitively expensive to researchers, and cheap convenience samples are fraught with representation and quality issues. NORC at the University of Chicago has built a survey panel […]
TITLE: AI & Social Manipulation ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will overview my decadelong journey into understanding the implications of online platform manipulation. I'll start from detecting malicious bots and other forms of manipulation including troll accounts, coordinated campaigns, and disinformation operations. The impact of my work will be corroborated with examples of findings enabled by […]
Title: Threat in the form of News: Examining the ways that news coverage of immigration constrains systemically marginalized groups Abstract: Although U.S. media portrayals of racial, ethnic, and other historically excluded identities vary based on the group, platform, and genre, generally speaking these groups have tended to be both underrepresented and, at times, unfavorably depicted across the […]
Title: How and why American journalism (accidentally) amplifies anti-democratic actors: Small town extremists, media storms, and a broken news industry Abstract: Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle. This newly-empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would […]
