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While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, these are hard conversations to have, especially in the United States amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity. Such interactions often devolve into…
Individuals belong to certain social groups in search of a sense of belonging, pride, stability, and significance. Perceiving the group to which one belongs as an "in-group" and other groups as "out-groups" often leads to harmful and…
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
While online hate groups pose significant risks to the health of online platforms and safety of marginalized groups, little is known about what causes users to become active in hate groups and the effect of social interactions on furthering…
Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily,…
Conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in games are typically confined to dialogue between a human player and a virtual agent, where the conversation is initiated and controlled by the player. To create richer, more believable…
While existing work on studying bias in NLP focues on negative or pejorative language use, Govindarajan et al. (2023) offer a revised framing of bias in terms of intergroup social context, and its effects on language behavior. In this…
Conversational agents have the potential to support intergroup relations when psychological or linguistic barriers prevent direct interaction. Based on intergroup contact theory, we propose GroupEnvoy, a conversational agent that represents…
Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…
Hyperchat AI is a communication and collaboration architecture that employs intervening AI agents to enable real-time conversational deliberations among networked human teams of unlimited size. Prior work has shown that teams as large as…
Emergent collective group processes and capabilities have been studied through analysis of transactive memory, measures of group task performance, and group intelligence, among others. In their approach to collective behaviors, these…
Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between…
It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo…
This study explores the dynamic relationship between online discourse, as observed in tweets, and physical hate crimes, focusing on marginalized groups. Leveraging natural language processing techniques, including keyword extraction and…
Collectives adapt their network structure to the challenges they face. It has been hypothesized that collectives experiencing a real or imagined threat from an outgroup tend to consolidate behind a few influential group members, and that…
We evaluate homophily and heterophily among ideological and demographic groups in a typical opinion formation context: online discussions of current news. We analyze user interactions across five years in the r/news community on Reddit, one…
We examine whether social data can be used to predict how members of Major League Baseball (MLB) and members of the National Basketball Association (NBA) transition between teams during their career. We find that incorporating social data…
Three theories offer competing predictions about how people respond to growing diversity in their social environment. Contact theory suggests more exposure to out-groups reduces prejudice; conflict theory predicts a stronger in-group…
This study investigates how different virtual agent (VA) behaviors influence subjects' perceptions and group decision-making. Participants carried out experimental group discussions with a VA exhibiting varying levels of engagement and…
We performed a massive study of the dynamics of group deliberation among several websites containing millions of opinions on topics ranging from books to media. Contrary to the common phenomenon of group polarization observed offline, we…