[1] R. M. Bond et al., “A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization,” Nature, vol. 489, no. 7415, pp. 295–298, 2012.
[2] J. E. Guillory et al., “Editorial Expression of Concern: Experimental evidence of massive scale emotional contagion through social networks,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 111, no. 29, pp. 10779–10779, 2014.
The two papers talked about social contagion and its effects in two perspectives which I feel are complementary to each other. The first paper talks about political self-expression being influenced by different levels of engagement on social media.
This reminds me of:
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”
―
This was a quote my mother used to refer to every time I went on trips with my friends warning me of her self-coined (I believe) phenomena of “temporary group insanity”. She kept narrating how monkeys near her home in her childhood used to act crazy watching other monkeys do it. I believe the social norm translating through a network with the need for an increased “tie strength” with nodes (in this case humans) that are perceived to be our networks “center” or an important node defining our network structure is what drives humans to follow their “close friends”. This is a psychological and philosophical take on the findings in the paper. The tool called ‘sense-making’ is a Human-Computer Interaction perspective on how humans tend to reason with the cues in the environment before processing it to take a decision. A meta-cognitive process involving situation awareness and cue saliency is the concoction, I believe, that controls an individuals decision to follow a friend or group of friends into political self-expression. As the paper states, this is not helping improve their social status or the research has no indication of it. There is no compelling social reason for us to click the “I Voted” button like peer-pressure. But I believe that since we are accustomed to following our formed set of heuristics it is easy for us to remain consistent, go with what is available, more familiar and appealing to one’s ‘affect’. These will generally point to taking a decision that helps us recognize ourselves as a part of our perceived group of ‘friends’ or ‘close friends’.
The question of whether we are in a time when we are at the “end of theory” resonated, even more, when all the paper did was use the millions of data points to infer a finding rather than hypothesize something or use the data to find a grounded theory about the behaviour of the individuals or groups.
From the point of quantitative analysis procedure that the paper follows the group I believe did a good job of designing the experiment with the controlled, informed and social groups with a backed inferred definition of ‘friends’ and ‘close friends’. I would like to see if the same could translate to other venues like Amazon.
- Would information about our ‘close friends’ or other people we relate to buying a product influence our decision to buy or not buy a product?
- Would it be the same with movies on Netflix?
- Can we use the information we can scrape from people who log-in on Amazon, Netflix with their Facebook IDs about their close friends to map the sort of products people would want to buy helping improve their experience?
- Will this be overdone if we used an algorithm to keep track of a social network of an individual to then curate the content he or she sees?
- Is this a new type of profiling?
- Is this ethical?
The reason I ask so many questions is the alarming realization one can come to from the conclusions that the paper draws. After the propaganda that the authors talk about towards the end, they elude to the fact that social influence can impact behavior not only online but offline as well. This reminds me of the dystopian society represented by the TV series “Black Mirror” where corporations control the way we think and behave.
Coming back to reality and putting the researcher hat back on, the second paper was more catered for the interests I have. Here the authors try to show the existence of emotional contagion. The papers attempt at establishing influence and interaction on social media platform is one of interest for me. The question of whether a persons expression is captured only by the text they input onto their walls or comments on others posts is very important. Do things like videos one clicks on, likes expressed, emojis sent, etc. influence the positive and negative emotion one expresses? If there is a shift in the norm of a community, which could be a scenario one can draw from the paper, where many community members are expressing negative emotions does this influence our “behavior” just in that community or overall?
For example, if John is your average inquisitive teenager who is adventurous and is a part of this online community on E-Sports. Initially, the community is well controlled or monitored or moderated. After a few months, the new and a few old members (let’s say a majority) start expressing a lot of aggression. Now at this point, John identifies himself with the community and does not want to feel left out so starts putting a facade of aggression for the members to accept him. He spends the time when he is not on the community watching cat videos and helping the elderly as he is a youth volunteer.
Now the question is, “Does exposure to the negative emotion on the community show emotional contagion and influence his behavior?”
