1/ Excited to share our new paper: Challenging Partisan Expectations Reduces Political Polarization We find that political conversations reduce polarization most when they challenge what people expect about partisan boundaries. 🧵 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.15901 #polisky

Challenging Partisan Expectations Reduces Political Polarization

Political conversations are often proposed as a remedy for political polarization, yet their effectiveness remains inconsistent. We argue that this inconsistency partly reflects a neglected feature of...

arxiv.org

As I mentioned in the below thread, this project involved many feats of engineering, led by the fantastic @markptorres.bsky.social. If you're a CS or CSS person interested in the gory details, see his blog post: markptorres.com/research/202...

William J. Brady@williambrady.bsky.social · 2mo ago

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

Very cool pilot study from @dowonkim.bsky.social using chatbots to examine how people respond to out-group agreement and in-group disagreement. Looking forward to seeing this project develop into the full study! #pacss2025 #polnet2025

Recent research shows that AI can durably reduce belief in conspiracies. But does this work b/c the AI is good at producing evidence, or b/c ppl really trust AI? In a new working paper, we show that the effect persists even if the person thinks they're talking to a human: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Conventional wisdom says interdisciplinary research is valuable but harder to get through peer review (need to please diverse reviewers, etc). @sdxiang.bsky.social Daniel and I partnered with @ioppublishing.bsky.social to test this wisdom and add nuance

What happens to people when researchers encourage them to deactivate Facebook or Instagram for a few weeks in the lead up to an election? People get modestly* happier/less depressed/less anxious. "The Facebook effect is driven by people >35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women <25."

New paper with @dianamejordan.bsky.social and sky-less Trent Ollerenshaw! We provide large-N tests of repeated measure designs in survey experiments, showing that they slightly attenuate ATEs relative to post-only designs, but provide large gains to precision. Thread below. Preprint: osf.io/q6czp

📄NEW PAPER📄 Ever wondered content people actually pay *attention* to online? Our new research reveals that you likely pay attention to far more varied political content than your likes and shares suggest

Interesting results, I wonder if stated preferences match behaviours, e.g., how many people are using bsky custom feeds?

Friederike Stock@fstock.bsky.social · 2y ago

People in 26 countries prefer more control over their online environment

 In a conjoint study (N = 11,868), we explored preferences for regulating online environments by examining binary choices between different regulation scenarios. Preprint:https://osf.io/preprints/osf/haqu9