How does social media generate outrage?

Backed by Skw, R B, and Eric D. Walters
$58
Raised of $1,500 Goal
4%
Ended on 3/10/15
Campaign Ended
  • $58
    pledged
  • 4%
    funded
  • Finished
    on 3/10/15

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.

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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.

Budget

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*All contributions will be matched 100% by Caltech!

We recruit regular people to participate in the experiment. They must, and should, be compensated for providing their time and effort. Participants can do our experiments online very easily in about 5 minutes. (Most of them find the experiment fun and interesting.) It costs us about $1.00 for each subject, including some overhead charges from Amazon for the payments, and we plan to recruit 1,000.

An essential part of the experiment involves participants choosing which non-profit organizations should get donations and which should not. It is critical to see what people will do when real money (the experiment's money) is at stake. Based on our preliminary data, we estimate that the experiment requires about $0.45 in donations for each subject.

Finally, the experiment is online, so we need a server to run it. We use DigitalOcean which is a very low-cost service.

Any extra funding over the target will be used to run additional participants.

Meet the Team

Kyle Carlson
Kyle Carlson

Team Bio

I focus on social science research that appeals to a broad, non-specialist audience. Some of my other research studies how news of mass layoffs and other economic shocks can affect people's health. As part of an ongoing collaboration, I'm studying why NFL players struggle with personal finances and bankruptcy. I've also worked on surveys of subprime homeowners during the mortgage crisis and an experiment on brain training.This social media experiment is part of my dissertation.

www.linkedin.com/in/kylecarlson1


* Cover photo by Darwin Bell (https://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/522222981...)


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