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I work on public opinion, media and climate politics. My latest paper talks about how reporting on events looks very different depending on the ideological color of the media outlet.
Giulio Rossetti, author of various network analysis libraries such as dynetx and ndlib.
Write large, Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer) is Duncan Watts’ laundry list of examples of how all our intuitions about how society works are self-justifying guesses divorced from evidence, except for his, because Yahoo let him build his own experimental online social networks. Bastard. Don’t let my jealousy stop you from reading the book, which will indeed reassure you of what the title says in some surprising ways.
- The Best Books on the Politics of Information recommended by Henry Farrell.
- Measurement and power in organisations (which mentions the Hubbard book on measurement).
- Minimum viable superorganism is a famed introduction to the prestige economy.
- Nick Chater, Would you Stand Up to An Oppressive Regime.
Pluralistic ignorance
A classic. See pluralistic ignorance
Toxoplasma of rage
The self-perpetuation and amplification of some already difficult pathologies through the contemporary mediascape is where we are all collectively really doomed. e.g. Toxoplasma of rage by Scott Alexander
More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it?
I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral — rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others — because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defence as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.
Acemoglu, Daron, and Asuman Ozdaglar. 2011. “Opinion Dynamics and Learning in Social Networks.” Dynamic Games and Applications 1 (1): 3–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13235-010-0004-1.
Ajduković, Dea. 2007. “Attitude change and need for cognition in debaters and non-debaters.” Diploma Thesis, Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu. http://darhiv.ffzg.unizg.hr/id/eprint/498/.
Bakshy, Eytan, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, and Lada Adamic. 2012. “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, 519–28. WWW ’12. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2187836.2187907.
Bechtel, Gordon. 2013. “Public Opinion About Income Inequality.” Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.1285/i20705948v6n2p238.
Bradshaw, S., and P. Howard. 2017. “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation” 2017.12. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cef7e8d9-27bf-4ea5-9fd6-855209b3e1f6.
Carson, Andrea, Aaron J. Martin, and Shaun Ratcliff. 2019. “Negative Campaigning, Issue Salience and Vote Choice: Assessing the Effects of the Australian Labor Party’s 2016 ‘Mediscare’ Campaign.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 0 (0): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2018.1563093.
Coscia, Michele. 2017. “Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances for Viral Propagation of Protomemes.” Communications of the ACM 61 (1): 70–77. https://doi.org/10.1145/3158227.
Deschâtres, Fabrice, and Didier Sornette. 2005. “Dynamics of Book Sales: Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks.” Physical Review E 72 (1): 016112. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.72.016112.
Dodds, Peter Sheridan, and Duncan J. Watts. 2005. “A Generalized Model of Social and Biological Contagion.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 232 (4): 587–604. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2004.09.006.
Elwert, Felix, and Christopher Winship. 2014. “Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable.” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (1): 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043455.
Farrell, Henry. 2012. “The Consequences of the Internet for Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 15 (1): 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-030810-110815.
Gilens, Martin. 2005. “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness.” Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (5): 778–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfi058.
Goel, Sharad, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts. 2015. “The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion.” Management Science, July, 150722112809007. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158.
Goel, Sharad, Jake M. Hofman, Sébastien Lahaie, David M. Pennock, and Duncan J. Watts. 2010. “Predicting Consumer Behavior with Web Search.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (41): 17486–90. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1005962107.
Goel, Sharad, Winter Mason, and Duncan J. Watts. 2010. “Real and Perceived Attitude Agreement in Social Networks.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99 (4): 611–21. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020697.
Goel, Sharad, Duncan J. Watts, and Daniel G. Goldstein. 2012. “The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks.” In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce - EC ’12, 623. Valencia, Spain: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2229012.2229058.
Gould, Eric D., and Esteban F. Klor. 2019. “Party Hacks and True Believers: The Effect of Party Affiliation on Political Preferences.” Journal of Comparative Economics 47 (3): 504–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2019.03.004.
Hurd, T. R., and James P. Gleeson. 2012. “On Watts’ Cascade Model with Random Link Weights,” November. http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5708.
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Kim, Yonghwan. 2015. “Does Disagreement Mitigate Polarization? How Selective Exposure and Disagreement Affect Political Polarization.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92 (4): 915–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015596328.
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Moussaïd, Mehdi, Juliane E. Kämmer, Pantelis P. Analytis, and Hansjörg Neth. 2013. “Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation.” PLoS ONE 8 (11): e78433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.
Newell, Barry, and Robert Wasson. 2002. “Social System Vs Solar System: Why Policy Makers Need History.” In. Grenoble.
Noelle-Neumann, E. 1991. “The Theory of Public Opinion: The Concept of the Spiral of Silence.” Annals of the International Communication Association 14 (1): 256–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1991.11678790.
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1974. “The Spiral of Silence A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24 (2): 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00367.x.
Oliver, J. Eric, and Thomas J. Wood. 2014. “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion.” American Journal of Political Science 58 (4): 952–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12084.
Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo, Claudio Castellano, Piet Van Mieghem, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2015. “Epidemic Processes in Complex Networks.” Reviews of Modern Physics 87 (3): 925–79. https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.87.925.
Rehkopf, David H., M. Maria Glymour, and Theresa L. Osypuk. 2016. “The Consistency Assumption for Causal Inference in Social Epidemiology: When a Rose Is Not a Rose.” Current Epidemiology Reports 3 (1): 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40471-016-0069-5.
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Sharma, Amit, Jake M. Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts. 2015. “Estimating the Causal Impact of Recommendation Systems from Observational Data.” Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation - EC ’15, 453–70. https://doi.org/10.1145/2764468.2764488.
Tan, Chenhao, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lillian Lee. 2016. “Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-Faith Online Discussions.” In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web, 613–24. WWW ’16. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. https://doi.org/10.1145/2872427.2883081.
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Watts, D. J. 2007. “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?${}$.” New York Times, April 15, 2007. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/bibtex.ashx?id=164546.
Watts, Duncan J. 2011. Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. 1st ed. New York: Crown Business.
———. 2014. “Common Sense and Sociological Explanations.” American Journal of Sociology 120 (2): 313–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/678271.
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Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, Maria Petrova, and Ruben Enikolopov. 2020. “Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media.” Annual Review of Economics 12 (1): 415–38. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-081919-050239.