false consensus on Facebook

Political scientists have known for a while that we're not so good at knowing our friends' political views; we, instead, tend to just think our friends agree with us much more than they actually do.

Why that's the case is a bit of a mystery. One theory is that we hide disagreement from our friends (or even lie a little about our beliefs) when we're in mixed company (especially when we're in the minority) - so it's only natural that when we disagree with our friends they wouldn't know it. Another explanation is that, regardless of how much information or disinformation we have about our friends, we all suffer from "false consensus bias," the tendency to think that others think like us.

Sharad Goel, Winter Mason and Duncan Watts try to pick apart what may be behind our misperceptions in 2010 paper that surveys Facebook friends, but I'm not sure they solve the mystery. (Although I do have a cold so maybe I'm too foggy to see it.)

They do, however, have tons of cool observations and insights. 

After looking at 900 pairs of friends, first off, they find that - as we'd expect - friends agree with each other about 75% of the time, which is 12 percentage points higher than random (since you'd expect a random pair in their sample to agree 63% of the time. They also find - again no surprises - that friends tend to overestimate how much they agree with their friends.

Things get interesting when the authors look at differences in those overestimations. They find two things. One, the more we actually disagree with our friends, the more we overestimate how much we agree. Two, the 'closer' we are to friends (ie the more friends we have in common), the less we overestimate our agreement.

The authors puzzle over why we might see those differences: is it because we actually know more about our close friends? Do we likewise share more information with those who we agree with, so we have a better sense of what they believe?

The puzzle, though, might be solved with two assumptions - one of which the authors point out, the other which they miss (although I may have missed their discussion of it). When it comes to overestimating our agreement with those we disagree with, we might just be dealing with a ceiling effect; if agree with someone on 90% of political issues, I can only overestimate our agreement by 10 percentage points, but with someone I agree with 60% of the time there's lots of room for overestimation. 

The other explanation is one the authors point to as well: this could all be about false consensus. The authors find that when we agree in reality, we know it 90% of the time (that is, only 10% of the time do we get it wrong and think we disagree). But when we disagree with someone, we only know it 40% off the time! What that means is that if we consistently guess agreement correctly 90% of the time and disagreement 40% of the time, we're going to "correctly" guess agreement with those we agree with more often.

The shape of virality

Tweets rarely go viral. Again, as Goel et al tell us in the paper I blogged about yesterday, almost all tweets we see are either one shot posts (95%) or first round retweets (3%). But that means 2% are viral-ish, being retweeted at least twice down the chain.

But what do those viral cascades look like? Are they like the spread of the flu, slowly working their way from person to person, infecting a few at at time but eventually hitting large swathes of the population? Or do they spread in bursts, propelled by super-tweeters? And is there something about the inherent tweet-worthiness of a post that makes it more likely to go viral?

Goel takes on these questions, again with Duncan Watts (and adding on Ashton Anderson and Jake Hofman), in an extremely impressive paper that tracks over a billion tweets and simulates diffusion on model networks with 25 million nodes. (Woah.)

First, they find that what we might call tweet cascades are even rarer than stated above. If you consider cascades that have at least 100 retweets, those make up only 0.025% of all initial tweets. (What's less clear is what percent of tweets we see on our wall are initial tweets or retweets. The fact that the authors track 600 million initial tweets and a total of 1.2 billion "adoptions" suggests that half of the tweets we see are re-tweets.)

When they do go viral, to get back to the questions above, they don't look like flu epidemics or like broadcasts - rather a mash of both kinds of cascades. Since pictures will save me using a thousand words:

The images are in order of their "structural virality" - the most "virally" cascade being in the bottom right corner - but all of them show a combination of both central tweeters broadcasting a tweet and lots of little tweeters passing it along.

A more interesting finding, though, is that there doesn't have to be anything particularly "sticky" about a tweet to see super cascades like the ones above. The authors do some impressive modeling on "scale free" networks (ones that look like Twitter) and find that even if you choose a fixed "stickiness" of tweets (ie the probability that they'll be retweeted) you'll find a similar array of cascades running simulations on those models as you find in reality on Twitter. In other words, whether a tweet turns out to be a dud or be a super-virus could just be a function of randomness. Cool stuff.

Viral social media stories?

When we think of the many ways social media has transformed our information worlds, one specter that comes to mind is that of the viral story - a news event that may be ignored by the lame-stream, but that seeps its way into Twitter or FB, slowly catches on (or flares immediately) and eventually saturates our online social networks.

But, while those events may or may not exist, they are probably exceedingly rare, according to a 2012 paper by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Daniel Goldstein. Those researchers tracked 80,000 Twitter stories to see what the typical "cascade" (wave of retweets started by a single tweet) looked like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of cascades can't really be called such - they are made up of a single tweet that never gets retweeted. 

But, the authors ask, even though most cascades never really happen, might there be enough huge cascades that they end up making up most (or much) of our social media news-stream. Not so. When we do retweet news stories we do so from the source; 60% of retweets aren't branching off from long information cascades, but are simply retweeting the story from its origin.

Of the 80,000 stories the researchers tracked, only about 0.001% make it out past 5 waves of retweets, suggesting that viral news stories are - if anything - extremely rare. The authors suggest instead that what may seem like viral social media stories may, in fact, be spread by the traditional media - and that they saturate our social media walls because everyone is picking up the story from, say, CNN or the Washington Post.

It could be, though, that the researchers' sample was too small to pick up the "mega-cascades" that we imagine are a unique feature of social media. The "Trayvon Martin" stories, which circulate for weeks on social media before being picked up by traditional media may be, truly, 1 in a million - or billion - rather than 1 in 80,000.

Still, the authors' findings make it hard to deny that the vast majority of news stories we see on Twitter are either initial tweets or one-off retweets - and that super cascades are the tiniest sliver of the news we see. Of the stories swirling around social media, almost all are stories users find from outside Twitter and bring into the network for a single exposure. It's show and tell rather than a game of telephone.

That would mean that what really matters for determining what we see in social media is not what people re-post, but rather what they find from the outside media and decide is important enough to post themselves.

open-minded conservatives?

I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, but - according to research from Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro - it looks like conservatives spend a lot more time hanging around liberal websites than liberals do on conservative sites.

Here's Gentzkow and Shapiro's breakdown of who visits the ten top conservative and liberal sites:

Conservative sites visitors

Liberal sites visitors

Assuming we trust their data, one explanation for the imbalance could simply be that there are tons more conservatives visiting all political sites; if that were the case, even if liberals and conservatives had similar biases toward consuming like-minded media, we'd still see more conservatives on liberal sites. But my guess is there aren't that many more conservatives lurking online.

Another possible explanation is that - as suggested in the title - conservatives are more open-minded than liberals. Either that or they are more willing to check out what the opposition is saying. That story is somewhat plausible; other research suggests that savvy ideologues are more inclined (than less informed ideologues) to click on "counter-attitudinal" articles because they're more comfortable debunking any opposing views they may happen to bump into.

Still, it's curious why you'd see so many more conservative ideologues venturing into liberal waters than vice versa. The final explanation I can come up with - and one that suits my lefty leanings - is that "liberal sites" aren't as liberal as "conservative sites" are conservative; that is, that a conservative visiting DailyKos is more likely to come across information he can jive with than a liberal is going to find on RushLimbaugh. In other words, liberal websites - as opposed to conservatives readers - are the ones who are open-minded.

Any other interpretations out there?

a note on Robin Williams and suicide

I am sad at Robin William's passing, but only sad for myself - not for Robin Williams. 

If I may, I suggest others not be sad for him either. To be so would be to assume that his last moments were filled with despair, confusion and a powerlessness to choose life. That might be an apt assumption to make for a sixteen year old who has been bullied and does not have the perspective to know that "it will get better," but not for a 63 year old artistic genius who has, very likely, lived a life far richer and deeper - in experience, emotion and wisdom - than I, at least, can hope for. His last moments may have been confused and despairing or they may have had a clarity of thought and welling of spirit that is beyond my understanding. I don't know. 

I do suspect, however, that we have a bias against suicide - that we see it as uniformly negative. While there are many reasons that is a good bias to have (not least, for perpetuating the species), I leave open the possibility that sometimes the choice of death is not something to feel sad about - but to respect, honor and maybe even admire.

Facebook polis

If you have a Facebook account which you visited even once in early August, you could not have missed it; Facebook walls normally filled with food photos, vacation Instagrams and Buzzfeed links, now overrun by posts condemning either Israel or Hamas, lamenting the fate of those in Gaza or defending the actions of Israel. The media noted the phenomenon, as did more than one of my Facebook connections, some who admitted to "defriending" friends over the online conflict.

While many saw the explosion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Facebook walls as an unfortunate violation of social media norms, this political scientist - and perhaps others like me who advocate for more citizen engagement - was heartened. Yes, I'm sure many of the posts "crossed lines" and it is never a good thing to lose a friend (over something like politics), but when you live in a society where people disagree strongly over important issues, nothing is better for democracy than a healthy debate.

That last statement is, of course, debatable. Those who study citizen deliberation - as will be unsurprising to anyone who's ever had a political discussion themselves - note that there are many potential downsides to "cross-cutting" dialogue. Instead of leading to better understanding, people engaged in political debate may just become more entrenched in their views. That's because we all share a pair of biases - confirmation and disconfirmation - which incline us to zero in on information that supports our views and swiftly discount information that challenges thems. More worrisome is the risk that comes when "lines are crossed" - that is, when debate becomes uglified by off-color comments, ad hominem attacks or other forms of nastiness. That's when friends get lost and, worse, people become convinced that those who disagree with them not only see the world differently but are some shade of "bad people."

But even though debate comes with considerable risks, we starry-eyed (small d) democrats have got to believe that the risks are outweighed by the benefits. For one, when we're silent about our views we have no chance of exposing others to different perspectives (and being exposed ourselves). (This is especially true today as we can become increasingly selective in our media choices.) While ignorance is arguably bliss on most topics, it can be dangerous when important issues are on the line. And even if we don't gain greater understanding of an issue through debate with our friends, there is a good chance that we'll appreciate other perspectives just by virtue of our friends holding them. This is the great hope of dialogue - that, at least when individuals share their views civilly (ie, avoiding nastiness), it's hard for rifts not to be somewhat narrowed (if rarely totally mended).

Whether the current Gaza-Israel Facebook battle results in a widening or narrowing of the divide between both sides - that is, whether the forces of repulsion or attraction win out in this case - is a matter of guess work. But maybe in some future of data-analysis wizardry we can test to see.

research finds

... from a trawl through 2013 research papers posted by Kevin Lewis:

• Messing with people's default categories of groups can promote tolerance.
• Having a sense of the meaning of life only helps you if it's stable over time.
• Explaining the decrease in human violence - since the dawn of history.
• Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the exceptions: forcing democracy rarely works.
• The price of voting, according to some economists, is about $10-$15. (Stefano Dellavigna et al)
• When politicians agree, it's not necessarily good for us. (Keena Lipsitz)
• One of the reasons citizens don't bother to vote may be because they know their representatives can't do much. (Ryan Carlin)
• An increasingly polarized media may be polarizing the most politically involved, but not the rest of us. (Markus Prior)
• ... And that may be because most of us tune out the polarized media. (Kevin Arcenaux et al)

words and phrases that need to be expunged from the English language...

... for meaning the opposite of themselves:

• Sanction
• Dig
• Inflammable

... for being overused and/or silly

• without further ado
• much ink has been spilled

the value of your social network

It's no longer prospective employers and online daters checking you out on Facebook.

social sciencese

Social scientists have their own language, which occasionally can confuse English speakers who are unfamiliar with the secret meanings normal everyday words take on in Social Sciencese - and which at other times obstinately insists on using dense indecipherable phrases instead of common words that mean the exact darn same thing.

This is a holding page for examples of such offenses.

Words social scientists use in other ways from you and me:

• To moderate

Phrases for which normal everyday English just won't do:

• Intimate extradyadic behavior = having an affair

recent research

From Kevin Lewis' April picks:

• Want to be more effective on the soapbox? Be abstract with your followers and concrete with those who may be more skeptical. (Michella Menegatti and friend)
• For DC interns, polarized workplaces breeds polarization. (David Jones)
• It takes more than just homophily (hanging out with people like ourselves) to breed partisanship: we need a dose of confirmation bias too. (Pranav Dandekar and friends)
• Twittering ourselves into political silos. (Itai Himmelboim and friends)
• The extreme partisanship in Congress is said to not reflect the public's views - but it may reflect the part of the public that pays attention to Congress. (Benjamin Lauderdale)
• People prefer doing meaningful work - even on mTurk. (Dana Chandler and friend)
• Online social mobilization's limits explored. (Alex Rutherford and friends)
• The Wikipedia magic formula for crowdsourcing may be losing its magic. (Aaron Halfaker and friends)
• A mini experiment showing what we all kinda know: playing as part of a team makes us generally more cooperative with our teammates. (Tobias Greitemeyer and friend)
• You are what you like. (Mickal Kosinski and friends)
• The great experiment in grading NYC kitchen cleanliness - comes up short. (Daniel Ho)

recent research

A selection of Kevin Lewis' March picks:

• Chimps' sense of fairness. (Darby Proctor and friends)
• One reason we act morally: it gets us trustworthiness points. (Brent Simpson and friends)
• Our GPA's are affected by our friends. (Deanna Blansky and friends)
• Sharing a similar sense of humor makes us want to share more. (Oliver Curry and friend)
• Revealing our names and photos makes us more open on blogs. (Erin Hollenbaugh and friend)
• Cool. Figuring out how we may make sense of info flowing through social networks - using agent based modeling. (Mark Laidre and friends)
• Facebook, profile photos and influencing sexual norms. (Sean D. Young and friend)
• Incivility online polarize perceptions - even on topics like technology. (Ashley Anderson and friends)
• We're all proselytizers of our lifestyle choices. (Krisin Laurin and friends)

recent research

From Kevin Lewis' February picks:

• Our ballots may be secret, but most Americans either don't believe it or don't care. (Alan Gerber and friends)
• A new explanation for variations in political participation: electrodermal responsiveness. (Michael Gruszczynski and friends)
• The fundraising and frontrunner feedback loop - caught by economists. (James Feigenbaum and friend)
• An argument for not getting rid of the electoral college - it's pretty fair. (AC Thomas and friends)
• Education is correlated with higher political participation, but that may just be because education is a proxy for social status. (Mikael Persson)
• If you're a politician it doesn't matter whether you get falsely vilified or credited; either way, when the truth comes out, you're worse off. (Michael Cobb and friends)
• Forget Intrade and Nate Silver - just ask 19,000 people who will win the next election to get the best prediction. (Michael K. Miller and friends)
• All that money spent on presidential campaign advertising is apparently well spent. (Brett R. Gordon and friend)
• Hmm... we misjudge candidates in part because of the "false memories" we make about them. (Jason Coronel and friends)
• How best to "counter-frame." (Chong and Druckman)
• Social pressure to vote works on women and minorities too. (Costas Panagopoulus)
• Voting technology and mail-in-voting mean fewer bum ballots. (R. Michael Alvarez and friends)
• Evidence that surveys may not represent reality. (Christian Vossler and friend)
• Candidates have a role in inspiring confidence in the voting process. (Greg Vannahme and friend)
• Maybe conservatives are just more sensitive. (Samantha Joel and friends)
• Re-affirming the ego on Facebook. (Catalina Toma and friends)
• Charting out the link between values and political attitudes. (Diana Boer and friend)
• Legislators may not be all about getting re-elected - or at least not flip-flopping on policies just to gain votes. (James Lo)
• An odd argument for why hyper-partisanship exists - because legislators can emphasize their position preferences (rather than their ability to bring home the pork). (Justin Grimmer)
• Gerrymandering is supposed to help incumbents - except it doesn't. (Stephen Ansolobehere and friend)
• Evidence that politicians have something to do with how their constituents think. (Tetsuya Matsubayashi)
• Direct democracy - at least in the form of California ballot initiatives - may not be so good for democracy. (Ly Lac and friends)
• A different view of representation - it's not about reflecting your constituent beliefs, but listening to them. (Rebekah Herrick)
• One reason Americans aren't fond of Congress - when it's out of sync with popular opinion. (Mark Ramirez)
• Voters punish corrupt politicians - but only when economic times are tough. (Elizabeth Zechmeister and friend)
• Voters are rationally irrational - except when they're not. (Michael D. Thomas and friend)
• People get a kick out of giving - all across the globe. (Lara Aknin and friends)...
• ... possibly more so when they're feeling like a superhero as demonstrated in this wicked cool experiment. (Robin Rosenberg and friends)
• ... but not so much if they're feeling superior or inferior to others as demonstrated in this somewhat less cool experiment. (Jonathan Yip and friend)
• Peer pressure makes us bigger - but less happy - givers. (Diane Reyniers and friends)
• Love it. Humans are not the only species that behave altruistically toward strangers. (Jingzhi Tan and friend)
• ... and one of the reasons they may give to strangers is that it's a good way to make friends, just like with humans. (Sebastian Fehrler and friend)
• Power makes us better long-term planners. (Priyanka Joshi and friend)
• ... but more prone to dehumanize others. (Jason Gwinn and friends)
• We're all a little bit honest and a little bit liars. (Rajna Gibson and friends)

recent research

Kevin Lewis picks from January 2012:

• Remembering political events that never happened... especially if they fit your political predispositions. (Steven Frenda and friends)
• And conservatives and liberals are just as likely to shape facts to fit their preconceptions. (Dan Kahan) 
• Ideologues tend to exaggerate the moral extremity of their counter-ideologues. (Jesse Graham and friends)
• How it is partisans can agree on many issues but still hate each other. (Lilliana Mason)
• News on the internet is thought to divide partisans even further - but social media could push the other direction. (Solomon Messing and friend)
• Compromise is for sissies. (Michael R. Wolf)
• More evidence that growing partisanship may be a matter of sorting. (Gary C. Jacobson)
• ... leaving out those whose social and economic views don't align with either party. (Edward Carmines and friends)
• Finding the factors - and functions - of human intelligence. (Adam Hampshire and friends)
• Working with teams makes us smarter - even after we leave the team. (Boris Maciojovsky and friends)
• Any "prosocial" behavior humans have is not necessarily consciously prosocial. (Maxwell Burton-Chellew)
• We're more cooperative when we've had a chance to talk to others - even in our imaginations. (Rose Meleady and friends)
• This article says something about the relationship between money in politics and perceptions of corruption - though I can't tell what. (Daron Shaw and friends)
• It may be obvious to Hill watchers - but academics are still trying to demonstrate that earmarks and campaign donations are connected. (Michael Rocca and friend)
• Our overconfidence may be about projecting overconfidence. (Stephen Burks and friends)
• We have a prodigious memory for FB posts (though it's not clear why). (Laura Mickes and friends)

recent research

The Kevin Lewis trawl continues:

• Social exclusion "hurts" - but when the pain of exclusion is dulled (with a little electrical impulse) people don't mind so much being left out. (Paolo Riva and friends)
• When we're gentle with our criticism chances are we're not protecting the object of the critique, we're protecting ourselves. (Carla Jeffries and friend)
• The network structures that promote "contagions:" it's the close knit groups, not the popular hubs, that matter. (Nicholas Harrigan and friends)
• We treat our thoughts like things. (Pablo Brinol and friends)
• A couple experiments showing that emotions affect our political thinking. (Cengiz Erisen and friends)
• We're not only immediate gratifiers for ourselves - but also for our close relatives. (Fenja Ziegler and friend)
• Good idea generators tend to becomes less good once you acknowledge their ideas. (Barry Bayus)
• Research has shown that we do our best thinking when we let our minds wander - but that only may be true for women. (Mark Niuwenstein and friend)
• Deliberation may have positive outcomes - even among the deeply divided. (James Fishkin and friends)
• Cultural sharing differences on Facebook and RenRen. (Lin Qiu and friends)

recent research

Another batch of Kevin Lewis picks:

• Voters are short-sighted, not because they're impatient but because they're uncertain about the future. (Alan M. Jacobs and friend)
• ... and they are more impressed by the number of pork projects their reps bring home to the district than by the total price-tag of those projects. (Justin Grimmer and friends)
• Citizens value public discourse but, paradoxically, don't like their elected officials on the soap box (as it feels like electioneering rather than leading). (Michael S. Evans)
• Money in politics may not be making citizens cynical - and could be informative. (Michael W. Sances)
• Self-affirmation makes us more open to seeing our mistakes. (Lisa Legault and friends)
• Money doesn't actually buy votes - as evidenced by self-financed candidates. (Adam R. Brown)
• Richard Lau tests his and Redlawsk's "correct voting" model.
• Social pressure is one of the best techniques to win over voters - but using it may also have a backlash effect. (Richard Matland and friend)
• More evidence that robotic calls are a waste of time. (Daron Shaw and friends)
• More participatory citizens are not necessarily more extreme. (Eitan Hersch)
• When party cues lead voters astray. (Logan Dancey and friend)
• Comfort with risk and candidate choice. (Cindy Kam and friend)
• Voting by mail boosts voter turnout - until the novelty wears off. (Paul Gronke)
• ... while social capital may not boost turnout at all - and could even decrease it. (Matthew Atkinson and friend)
• Candidates tainted by the groups associated with them. (Nathaniel Swigger)
• Habitual voting. (Elias Dinas)
• Evidence that voters do pick up information in campaigns - when candidates are moderate. (Dona-Gene Mitchell)
• Asking someone to not "cheat" or not "be a cheater" can make all the difference. (Christopher Bryan and friends)
• When it comes to evaluating influential people, liberals and conservatives may not differ so much. (Jeremy Frimer and friends)
• Dishonesty is contagious. (Robert Innes and friend)
• Evidence from 5 year olds and chimpanzees that humans are uniquely keen to "manage their impression." (Jan Engelmann and friends) ... dittoed in Kristin Leimgruber and friends' work
• A two step theory of the rise of cooperation in humans. (Michael Tomasello and friends)
• Coalition and cooperation games with Nash.
• More evidence that social pressure beats financial incentives in getting behaviors to stick. (Rob Nelissen and friend)
• A model on the evolution of trust. (Michael Manapat and friends)...
• ... and some neuroimaging suggesting we have at least two neural networks for deciding when to cooperate. (Carolyn Ceclerck and friends)
• As evidenced by different ultimatum-type games, not all pro-social behaviors are necessarily the same. (Toshio Yamagishi and friends)
• Using "cognitive reappraisal" to get deliberators to have an open mind. (Eran Halperin)

Recent research

Still catching up with a year of Kevin Lewis posts:

• Researchers spend time in an Athens subway station and observe who punishes "norm violators." (Loukas Balafoutas and friend)
• The good and bad news: consuming media increases perceived risk of terrorism. (Ashley Nellis and friend)
• In social sciences to show "statistical significance" the norm is to get a p-value of 0.05 or less. Unsurprisingly a disproportionate number of published studies just nick the 0.05 mark. (EJ Masicampo and friend)...
• ... which may be one reason most studies are refuted after publication. (Francois Gonon and friends)...
• ... or maybe it's because researchers design studies to get the results they want. (Brent Strickland and friend)
• When politicians we like behave badly, instead of admonishing or forgiving them we may just "decouple" their performance from their morality. (Amit Bhattacharjee and friends)
• We're natural cheaters, unless we have time to reflect and no available justifications for cheating. (Shaul Shalvi and friend)
• We're also natural cooperators, unless we have time to reflect. (David Rand and friends)
• Do we do good for goodness sake or for recognition? This study kinda sorta tries to answer that question. (Liane Young and friends)
• Americans may not be getting more polarized in their beliefs - but that doesn't stop them from increasingly disliking the opposing party. (Iyengar and friends)
• Examining the personality-ideology connection... and not finding much. (Chris Sibley and friends)
• Without realizing it, we so easily can be duped into arguing against our own opinions. (Lars Hall and friends)
• Getting more poor people to the polls doesn't mean their elected officials will pay more attention to them. (Patrick Flavin)
• I think this guy is saying we're more likely to go to the polls when we feel informed - but stay home when we see others are really informed, which is one way to explain why we may never see near 100% voter participation. (Joseph C. McMurray)
• One strategy to getting re-elected: make sure your home team has a good season. (Michael K. Miller)
• Self-censoring to avoid offending ad-buyers is not just an American media phenomenon. (Fabrizio Germano)
• Busting the self-control - glucose theory. (Daniel C. Molden and friends, and Martin Hagger and friends)
• Woah. Researchers experimentally model the evolution of cooperation - in yeast. (Adam James Waite and friend)
• More evidence that we just want our lives to be meaningful. (Peggy Thoits)
• The next economic shift isn't from goods to services, but from goods to service-goods. (James Tien)
• Our feelings about risk in the economic realm... don't apply to the social. (Tim Johnson and friends)
• Emotional intelligence can be primed. (Nicola Schutte)
• When thinking socially we shut down our mechanical-engineering brain and vice versa. (Anthony I. Jack and friends)
• When judging incumbents, we tend to forget the distant past. (Greg Huber and friends)
• When we lose a sense of personal control we gladly give control to others. (Bob Fennis and friend)...
• ... but we're always susceptible to influence from others when deciding moral dilemmas. (Payel Kundu and friend)
• Mere exposure effect at work again - this time in the Eurovision Song Contest. (Diarmuid Verrier and friend)
• Macaque monkeys are also susceptible to the representative bias. (Jerald Kralik and friends)
• Evidence that taking on another's perspective makes us less attached to our earlier beliefs. (Erin Beatty and friend)...
• ... as does suspending those beliefs. (Ilan Yaniv and friend)
• The internet may not be dividing us after all. (Kelly Garrett and friends)
• More attempts to classify ideologues: using a variation on Haidt's moral foundations (Christopher Weber and friend); and using social and economic dimensions (Edward Carmines and friends).
• Etzioni asks if American democracy is delivering the policies its people wants, why is everyone so unhappy?
• How married couples increase partisanship. (Casey Klofstad and friends)
• Listening to the opposition can be stressful. (Hart Blanton and friends)
• Seeing the economy through partisan lenses. (Peter Enns and friend)
• The pointlessness of trying to be a bipartisan president. (George C. Edwards)
• Ugh. Another personality and ideology study - but this time from Yale bigwigs. (Alan Gerber and friends)
• Comparing the US political blogosphere to the UK's and Germany's. (Ki Deuk Hyun)
• Trust and partisanship. (Ryan Carlin)
• Partisanship only affects policy attitudes for unfamiliar policies. (Daniel E. Bergen)
• Yup. The media prefers conflict to moderation. (Michael McCluskey)

recent research

Catching up on a year of Kevin Lewis picks (first year of grad school was a bit of a distraction):

• Humans don't always act the way economists and game theorists think they should - unless they're acting as a group. (Gary Charness and Mattias Sutter)
• Bosses matter. (Edward P. Lazear and friends)
• An evolutionary psychology + game theoretic approach to why we don't like bullies. (Sergey Gavrilets)
• Laughter: grooming for species with large group sizes (aka humans). (Guillaume Dezecache)
• Extraverts make good early impressions, but neurotics may gain more respect in the long haul. (Corinne Bendersky and friend)
• Crowdsourcing predictive algorithms. Woah. (Josh C. Bongard and friends)
• Division of roles is generally considered to be good for goups, but humans often take on life-long roles that can be inflexible. Heather J. Goldsby and friends explain why evolution may have made us that way.
• Josiah Ober argues for democracy's third "core value": dignity.
• One reason why humans butcher each other so much less today than in most of recorded history: technology removed the need to fight over scarce life-sustaining resources. (Nils Petter-Lagerlof)
• Why a little self-righteousness is good for humans. (Duenez-Guzman and friend)
• We're uncomfortable acting selfishly - unless we've been told we have to be. (Jonathan Berman and friend)
• When confronted with chaos, lower-classes get more communal while the rich get more attached to their money. (Paul Piff and friends)...
• ... but that doesn't mean those in low-income areas are always more altruistic. (Jo Holland and friends)
• More evidence that trust is on the decline in the US. (April K. Clark and friends)...
• ... that may have something to do with rising inequality. (Christian Bjornskov)...
• ... but the again, we may become less trust-worthy when we feel like we've been screwed. (Daniel House and friends)
• Competition may be good for society, but that doesn't mean it feels good along the way. (Christopher K. Hsee)
• Time to think may make us less - not more - generous. (Jonathan Schulz and friends)
• Even the communitarian among us prefer only to commune with those who share their values. (Kenneth D. Locke and friends)
• Oxytocin may make us more generous and trusting - but doesn't make us more fair. (Sina Radke and friend)
• Working on a knotty puzzle? Let your mind wander. (Benjamin Baird and friends)...
• ... but maybe only after you've put in a moderate amount of deliberative thought. (Haiyang Yand and friends)
• Moral and political intolerance may be replacing their racial and ethnic versions. (Linda Skitka and friends)
• One way to cut down on confirmation bias: make new information difficult to read. (Ivan Hernandez and friend)...
• ... or maybe by disrupting the "inferior frontal gyrus"? (Tali Sharot and friends)...
• ... or maybe an increased belief in free-will? (Jessica Alquist and friends)
• Evidence that when our behavior changes our preferences (ie "cognitive dissonance"), it's long-lasting. (Tali Sharot and friends, again)
• What's going on in the brain when we accept or reject new info. (Anja Achtziger and friends)
• Roland Benabou explores the mechanisms of groupthink.

recent research

Posting a "this week's picks" from Kevin Lewis' blog - which is actually from a week in September 2012:

• Groups behave more like Homo Economicus than do individual humans. (Gary Charness)
• A theory to explain why humans are so egalitarian: it paid our ancestors to band together against bullies. (Sergey Gavrilets)
• Laughter brings people together - and may be the reason why humans could form larger groups (than our primate relatives). (Guillaume Dezecache)
• Extroverts may impress initially, but Neurotics end up surpassing expectations. (Corinne Bendersky)
• Not entirely sure what's going on here - but it looks like researchers are crowdsourcing research. (Josh Bongard)
• Humans just might be the only species that punish free-riders. (Katrin Riedl)
• Observing cultural traits build - in the laboratory. (Christina Matthews)
• Also in the lab - individuals get a buzz from "group" success, even if they get no actual payoff themselves. (Maxwell Burton-Chellew)
• Direct voting and deliberation help to legitimize decisions - at least with high school kids. (Mikael Persson)
• Feeling out of control can make one clingy and cliquey. (Immo Fritsche) And prefer autocrats. (David Rast)
• We're all trying to convince others (and ourselves) - until others understand us. (Nadira Faulmuller)
• We play nice - as long we know others can drop us in games. (Jing Wang)

the paradoxes of empathy

Is expanding our capacity for empathy the key to human progress? Or does empathy get in the way of solving our most intractable problems?

Paul Bloom discusses (and concludes) in a good read in the New Yorker:

Such are the paradoxes of empathy. The power of this faculty has something to do with its ability to bring our moral concern into a laser pointer of focussed attention. If a planet of billions is to survive, however, we’ll need to take into consideration the welfare of people not yet harmed—and, even more, of people not yet born. They have no names, faces, or stories to grip our conscience or stir our fellow-feeling. Their prospects call, rather, for deliberation and calculation. Our hearts will always go out to the baby in the well; it’s a measure of our humanity. But empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future.