Lab Director Duncan Watts and co-authors David Rothschild and Baird Howland explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. They validate earlier findings that, despite large shifts in news consumption habits over time, television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. In the process, they demonstrate the usefulness of passively collected data for measuring quantities for which different researchers might reasonably choose different definitions.
Read the forthcoming article on SSRN here.