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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…
A central challenge in any study of the effects of beliefs on outcomes, such as decisions and behavior, is the risk of omitted variables bias. Omitted variables, frequently unmeasured or even unknown, can induce correlations between beliefs…
Behavioral scientists have classically documented aversion to algorithmic decision aids, from simple linear models to AI. Sentiment, however, is changing and possibly accelerating AI helper usage. AI assistance is, arguably, most valuable…
The World Wide Web provides unrivalled access to information globally, including factual news reporting and commentary. However, state actors and commercial players increasingly spread biased (distorted) or fake (non-factual) information to…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
Analysis of longitudinal randomised controlled trials is frequently complicated because patients deviate from the protocol. Where such deviations are relevant for the estimand, we are typically required to make an untestable assumption…
Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…
Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
The dynamics of information dissemination in social networks is of paramount importance in processes such as rumors or fads propagation, spread of product innovations or "word-of-mouth" communications. Due to the difficulty in tracking a…
Many online experiments exhibit dependence between users and items. For example, in online advertising, observations that have a user or an ad in common are likely to be associated. Because of this, even in experiments involving millions of…
Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society. Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the information. In…
The democratization of AI tools for content generation, combined with unrestricted access to mass media for all (e.g. through microblogging and social media), makes it increasingly hard for people to distinguish fact from fiction. This…
We study the diffusion of information in an overlaying social-physical network. Specifically, we consider the following set-up: There is a physical information network where information spreads amongst people through conventional…
In the digital environment, human attention is frequently guided by cognitive heuristics rather than deliberate evaluation. Since low-credibility narratives often lack substantive factual evidence, their diffusion disproportionally relies…
A/B testing methodology is generally performed by private companies to increase user engagement and satisfaction about online features. Their usage is far from being transparent and may undermine user autonomy (e.g. polarizing individual…
A lack of awareness surrounding secure online behaviour can lead to end-users, and their personal details becoming vulnerable to compromise. This paper describes an ongoing research project in the field of usable security, examining the…
Online and in the real world, communities are bonded together by emotional consensus around core issues. Emotional responses to scientific findings often play a pivotal role in these core issues. When there is too much diversity of opinion…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…