Related papers: Motivated Reasoning and Blame: Responses to Perfor…
Estimating the causal effect of a time-varying public health intervention on the course of an infectious disease epidemic is an important methodological challenge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers attempted to estimate the effects…
Governments have used social distancing to stem the spread of COVID-19, but lack evidence on the most effective policy to ensure compliance. We examine the effectiveness of fines and informational messages (nudges) in promoting social…
This paper studies conspiracy and debunking narratives about COVID-19 origination on a major Chinese social media platform, Weibo, from January to April 2020. Popular conspiracies about COVID-19 on Weibo, including that the virus is…
Narrative frames are a powerful way of conceptualizing and communicating complex, controversial ideas, however automated frame analysis to date has mostly overlooked this framing device. In this paper, we connect elements of narrativity…
An information outbreak occurs on social media along with the COVID-19 pandemic and leads to infodemic. Predicting the popularity of online content, known as cascade prediction, allows for not only catching in advance hot information that…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
From conspiracy theories to fake cures and fake treatments, COVID-19 has become a hot-bed for the spread of misinformation online. It is more important than ever to identify methods to debunk and correct false information online. In this…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
How different cultures react and respond given a crisis is predominant in a society's norms and political will to combat the situation. Often the decisions made are necessitated by events, social pressure, or the need of the hour, which may…
Because SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) statistics affect economic policies and political outcomes, governments have an incentive to control them. Manipulation may be less likely in democracies, which have checks to ensure transparency. We show that…
With the world-wide development of 2019 novel coronavirus, although WHO has officially announced the disease as COVID-19, one controversial term - "Chinese Virus" is still being used by a great number of people. In the meantime, global…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex tasks with advances in reasoning capabilities. However, existing reward mechanisms remain tightly coupled to final correctness and pay little attention to the underlying reasoning process:…
Social media enables activists to directly communicate with the public and provides a space for movement leaders, participants, bystanders, and opponents to collectively construct and contest narratives. Focusing on Twitter messages from…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
Although cognitive science has discovered several methods for increasing the learning of complex skills, such as physics problem solving, detailed examination of verbal protocols suggests there is still room for improvement. Basically,…
Debunking misinformation is an important and time-critical task as there could be adverse consequences when misinformation is not quashed promptly. However, the usual supervised approach to debunking via misinformation classification…
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 disease have had an unprecedented spread and continue to cause an increasing number of fatalities worldwide. While vaccines are still under development, social distancing, extensive…
We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after…
COVID-19 pandemic has generated what public health officials called an infodemic of misinformation. As social distancing and stay-at-home orders came into effect, many turned to social media for socializing. This increase in social media…