Tag Archives: human behavior

Scientific American: People, Not Google’s Algorithm, Create Their Own Partisan ‘Bubbles’ Online

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Scientific American: People, Not Google’s Algorithm, Create Their Own Partisan ‘Bubbles’ Online. “A study published today in Nature found that Google’s search engine does not return disproportionately partisan results. Instead politically polarized Google users tend to silo themselves by clicking on links to partisan news sites. These findings suggest that, at least when it comes to Google searches, it may be easier for people to escape online echo chambers than previously thought—but only if they choose to do so.”

Stanford University: Is That Self-Driving Car a Boy or a Girl?

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Stanford University: Is That Self-Driving Car a Boy or a Girl?. “In her latest researchopen in new window, conducted with Malia Masonopen in new window of Columbia University, [Professor Ashley] Martin looks at how people respond when real or imagined products are assigned a gender — or no gender. One of their studies analyzed Amazon.com reviews to see how shoppers reacted to the anthropomorphizing and gendering of robotic vacuums.”

Stanford University: New model seeks to explain how humans interact socially with robots

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Stanford University: New model seeks to explain how humans interact socially with robots. “When people encounter social robots, they tend to treat them as both machine and character. A Stanford psychologist and his collaborator explain why in a much-discussed paper.”

Psychology Today: Social Media and Empathy Around the Globe

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Psychology Today: Social Media and Empathy Around the Globe. “To investigate the relationship between empathy and social media use, alongside colleagues at the University of Indiana, we asked more than 1,250 Americans to estimate how frequently they checked Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and to complete questionnaires where they self-described various qualities that researchers call empathy, such as trying to take other people’s perspectives, feeling concerned for other people in distress, and feeling bad when others feel bad.”

Queen Mary University of London: Social media platforms letting down autistic users, new research shows

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Queen Mary University of London: Social media platforms letting down autistic users, new research shows. “Researchers led by Queen Mary’s Professor Nelya Koteyko held in-depth interviews with autistic adults to explore how they use social media, how they feel about the way the platforms work and how that impacts their interactions.”

Fast Company: How social media makes us more susceptible to advertising

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Fast Company: How social media makes us more susceptible to advertising. “Social media can be mentally draining. And when mentally drained, you are more likely to be influenced by a high number of likes on posts—even to the point of clicking on ads for products you don’t need or want—according to our recent experiments on how social media affects behavior.”

Discover: Social Media Is Not to Blame for Dwindling Face-to-Face Communication

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Discover: Social Media Is Not to Blame for Dwindling Face-to-Face Communication. “It’s a familiar and seemingly logical argument: Social media makes us less social. We’re hooked to our phones at the expense of going out into the real world and interacting with other people. And according to Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies and director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas, the concept even has a name: the social displacement hypothesis.”

UC San Diego: AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent

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UC San Diego: AI Chatbot ChatGPT Mirrors Its Users to Appear Intelligent. “In a new paper published in Neural Computation, Professor Terrence Sejnowski of the University of California San Diego and Salk Institute, author of The Deep Learning Revolution, explores the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary and how to improve them in the future. According to Sejnowski, language models reflect the intelligence and diversity of their interviewer.”

Why Some Taylor Swift Stans Are Ganging Up On ‘Gaylors’: Report (Rolling Stone)

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Rolling Stone: Why Some Taylor Swift Stans Are Ganging Up On ‘Gaylors’: Report. “Researchers from the social media firm Graphika found that harassment runs amok in the fan community — and it can teach us a lot about how people behave online.”

Northwestern University: People online might not be as outraged as you think

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Northwestern University: People online might not be as outraged as you think. “The prevalence of moral outrage online can be explained in part by our psychology, according to William Brady, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Brady recently led a new study, published April 10, 2023 in Nature Human Behavior, that explores why people tend to misperceive others as angrier than they really are online. In turn, he says, users tend to engage with triggering content, thereby amplifying it and giving it an algorithmic boost.”

Washington Post: How we might stop the flood of data-driven misinformation

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Washington Post: How we might stop the flood of data-driven misinformation. “People are often tempted to trust statistics and algorithms as neutral arbiters. But algorithms are incapable of independently understanding the worth of what they’re generating. They’re also very good at producing the appearance of meaning, which makes it that much easier to trawl through data sets in search of the conclusions you want to see in them.”

Motherboard: Here’s a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills

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New-to-me, from Motherboard: Here’s a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills. “Chills are an innate response for most people. Whether you’re watching a scary movie, or get some harrowing news, it’s a common emotional response to stimuli. And now, scientists have created a database of certain media that has the potential to give you the chills.”

Syracuse University: Syracuse Researchers Create a Global Occupant Behavior Database for ASHRAE

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Syracuse University: Syracuse Researchers Create a Global Occupant Behavior Database for ASHRAE. “SyracuseCoE Associate Director and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Bing Dong and several students have compiled research from 15 countries on how building occupants behave – more specifically, how they interact with building systems like windows, doors, light switches, thermostats and fans.”

NewsWise: Want More Generous Children? Show Them Awe-inspiring Art

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NewsWise: Want More Generous Children? Show Them Awe-inspiring Art. “Concert halls, movie theaters, and museums are home to a kaleidoscope of art forms, but one thing they all have in common is the potential to inspire feelings of awe. This humbling perspective has been shown to motivate adults to set aside their own problems to focus on the needs of others, and new research in Psychological Science suggests that awe can encourage generosity in children too.”

University of New Mexico: How social media big data helps us better understand social dynamics

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University of New Mexico: How social media big data helps us better understand social dynamics. “If tweets are measured in characters and a picture is worth a thousand words, what do you get when you combine and examine thousands or even millions of social media posts at once? The answer is a lot of data and researchers at The University of New Mexico use it to study social dynamics and human behavior.”