About This Project

Every day we see people on Facebook, Twitter, and news comments expressing outrage about organizations and leaders. But how are these expressions actually influencing the behavior of other members of the public? We are running experiments to test whether (and when) social media can cause a group's behavior to be more extreme and erratic.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Over 2 billion people worldwide use social media, but we know little about how this technology affects society. One part of the problem is that social media so new. Another part is that studying its effects at the societal level is difficult. We'd like to have a copy of each country (or the entire world) that doesn't have social media. Then we could compare our society to the copy that does not have social media.

This ideal is impossible, but we aim to get close. Our experiments create numerous "miniature societies" in a controlled environment where groups of people can support or oppose real non-profit organizations in terms of real money. Some of the mini-societies have social media and others do not. We can then measure the impact of social media in terms of dollars.

What is the significance of this project?

Many claim that social media will positively influence society by allowing people to express their beliefs, discuss controversial issues, and influence leaders. But, people seem just as likely to use social media for bullying, harassment, shaming, and vigilanteism.

Outrage fueled by social media can make big impacts on leaders and organizations. (I put a list of examples in Lab Note 1.) However, many questions remain: Does social media cause more outrage overall or just make it more visible? Does the outrage accurately represent widely-held attitudes (who leaders should listen to) or is it just small groups of people who are especially active and loud? Finally, are there ways to design social media technology to maximize the beneficial effects and minimize negative ones?

What are the goals of the project?

We have preliminary data from an early version of the experiment. These results demonstrate that the experiment is feasible and that all the software and processes are functioning well. The data suggest that social media is having interesting effects that are consistent with our hypotheses. Now, we want to ensure these findings are reliable and hold up under a variety of conditions.

We plan to study whether the types of organizations and news events involved in the study matter. For example, does the effect of social media depend on whether an organization did something that is controversial vs. something that everyone agrees is outrageous? We also want to test whether stories about positive activities tend to distract people and diffuse social media outrage.