People

@article{lifchits2021success,

title = {Success stories cause false beliefs about success},

author = {Lifchits, George and Anderson, Ashton and Goldstein, Daniel G. and Hofman, Jake M. and Watts, Duncan J.},

url = {http://journal.sjdm.org/21/210225/jdm210225.pdf},

issn = {1930-2975},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-11-30},

journal = {Judgment and Decision Making},

volume = {16},

number = {6},

pages = {1439-1463},

abstract = {Many popular books and articles that purport to explain how people, companies, or ideas succeed highlight a few successes chosen to fit a particular narrative. We investigate what effect these highly selected “success narratives” have on readers’ beliefs and decisions. We conducted a large, randomized, pre-registered experiment, showing participants successful firms with founders that all either dropped out of or graduated college, and asked them to make incentive-compatible bets on a new firm. Despite acknowledging biases in the examples, participants’ decisions were very strongly influenced by them. People shown dropout founders were 55 percentage points more likely to bet on a dropout-founded company than people who were shown graduate founders. Most reported medium to high confidence in their bets, and many wrote causal explanations justifying their decision. In light of recent concerns about false information, our findings demonstrate how true but biased information can strongly alter beliefs and decisions.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{almaatouq2021task,

title = {Task complexity moderates group synergy},

author = {Almaatouq, Abdullah and Alsobay, Mohammed and Yin, Ming and Watts, Duncan J.},

url = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/36/e2101062118},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.2101062118},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-09-07},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

volume = {118},

number = {36},

abstract = {Complexity—defined in terms of the number of components and the nature of the interdependencies between them—is clearly a relevant feature of all tasks that groups perform. Yet the role that task complexity plays in determining group performance remains poorly understood, in part because no clear language exists to express complexity in a way that allows for straightforward comparisons across tasks. Here we avoid this analytical difficulty by identifying a class of tasks for which complexity can be varied systematically while keeping all other elements of the task unchanged. We then test the effects of task complexity in a preregistered two-phase experiment in which 1,200 individuals were evaluated on a series of tasks of varying complexity (phase 1) and then randomly assigned to solve similar tasks either in interacting groups or as independent individuals (phase 2). We find that interacting groups are as fast as the fastest individual and more efficient than the most efficient individual for complex tasks but not for simpler ones. Leveraging our highly granular digital data, we define and precisely measure group process losses and synergistic gains and show that the balance between the two switches signs at intermediate values of task complexity. Finally, we find that interacting groups generate more solutions more rapidly and explore the solution space more broadly than independent problem solvers, finding higher-quality solutions than all but the highest-scoring individuals.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{konitzer2021comparing,

title = {Comparing Estimates of News Consumption from Survey and Passively Collected Behavioral Data},

author = {Konitzer, Tobias and Allen, Jennifer and Eckman, Stephanie and Howland, Baird and Mobius, Markus and Rothschild, David and Watts, Duncan J.},

url = {https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/poq/nfab023/6356135?login=true},

doi = {10.1093/poq/nfab023},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-08-21},

urldate = {2021-08-21},

journal = {Public Opinion Quarterly},

abstract = {Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield biased estimates of behavior. Here we explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We validate these earlier findings, showing that they continue to hold despite large shifts in news consumption habits over time, while also adding some new nuance regarding question wording. We extend these findings to survey reports of online and social media news consumption, with respect to both levels and trends. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of passively collected data for measuring a quantity such as “consuming news” for which different researchers might reasonably choose different definitions. Finally, recognizing that passively collected data suffers from its own limitations, we outline a framework for using a mix of passively collected behavioral and survey-generated attitudinal data to accurately estimate consumption of news and related effects on public opinion and knowledge, conditional on media consumption.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{hosseinmardi2021examining,

title = {Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube},

author = {Homa Hosseinmardi and Amir Ghasemian and Aaron Clauset and Markus Mobius and David M. Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts},

url = {https://www.pnas.org/content/118/32/e2101967118},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.2101967118},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-08-10},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

volume = {118},

number = {32},

abstract = {Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical “anti-woke” channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of “anti-woke” content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}