Jay Van Bavel, PhD

Social media discourse is driven by false #polarization

Analyzing 1.7 million social media posts, a series of controlled experiments, and a large global survey covering 40 countries (total N = 49,222), we find that

(1) strong ideologues post their opinions significantly more often than moderate individuals
(2) extreme attitudes are posted more often than moderate attitudes.
(3) This general pattern replicates robustly across 40 countries
(4) the opinions that users post are more hostile and toxic than the beliefs they keep to themselves.

Across studies we find extreme opinions are overrepresented on social media by at least 6% and up to 22% compared to their true prevalence in our samples.
osf.io/preprints/psya…

This project was led by @small_schulz and @ClaireRobertson and includes @H_Sjastad @AshuAshok @LisaFOswaldo @junghwanyang @simonsaysnothin and @andyguess

Academic fraud is widespread

In a record-breaking retraction, a scholarly publisher pulled 1,400 conference papers in one day

Many of these papers were from "paper mills" that sell authorship to the highest bidder. Trices for authorship ranged from US$43 to $400 for a first-author slot and $11 to $200 for a last-author slot.

nature.com/articles/d4158…

Attraction to politically extreme users on social media

One driver of segregation is political acrophily—people's preference for others in their political group who have more extreme (rather than more moderate) political views.

Acrophily is associated with higher levels of out-group animosity and is more pronounced among conservatives on Twitter/X.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/arti…

People argue endlessly about this online, but the results are common sense:

Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds

This study asked a live crowd (N = 5,180) to respond to general-knowledge questions (eg "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?")

Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates.

Averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. In short, small groups beat the wisdom of crowds.

Combining as few as four consensus choices in small groups outperformed the wisdom of over 5,000 individuals.

The key was reasoning together--that aspect of collective deliberation allowed small groups to make more accurate estimates than massive crowds.

nature.com/articles/s4156…