Suchergebnisse

This is the final published version, available from Nature Research via the DOI in this record. ; Data availability: For confidentiality reasons, the Twitter data are only available upon request. A reporting summary for this article is available as a Supplementary Information file. Full experimental materials can be found here: https://osf.io/guk3m/. ; We investigate the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection and behavior on the social media platform Twitter, using a convenience sample of N = 1,901 individuals from Prolific. We find that people who score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Test-a widely used measure of reflective thinking-were more discerning in their social media use, as evidenced by the types and number of accounts followed, and by the reliability of the news sources they shared. Furthermore, a network analysis indicates that the phenomenon of echo chambers, in which discourse is more likely with like-minded others, is not limited to politics: people who scored lower in cognitive reflection tended to follow a set of accounts which are avoided by people who scored higher in cognitive reflection. Our results help to illuminate the drivers of behavior on social media platforms and challenge intuitionist notions that reflective thinking is unimportant for everyday judgment and decision-making. ; Templeton World Charity Foundation ; Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative of the Miami Foundation ; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

This is the final published version, available from the National Academy of Sciences via the DOI in this record ; Data Availability: All data and scripts necessary to reproduce the results are available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/s5e6j/. ; Americans are much more likely to be socially connected to copartisans, both in daily life and on social media. However, this observation does not necessarily mean that shared partisanship per se drives social tie formation, because partisanship is confounded with many other factors. Here, we test the causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in a field experiment on Twitter. We created bot accounts that self-identified as people who favored the Democratic or Republican party and that varied in the strength of that identification. We then randomly assigned 842 Twitter users to be followed by one of our accounts. Users were roughly three times more likely to reciprocally follow-back bots whose partisanship matched their own, and this was true regardless of the bot's strength of identification. Interestingly, there was no partisan asymmetry in this preferential follow-back behavior: Democrats and Republicans alike were much more likely to reciprocate follows from copartisans. These results demonstrate a strong causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in an ecologically valid field setting and have important implications for political psychology, social media, and the politically polarized state of the American public. ; William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ; Reset project of Luminate ; Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative ; National Science Foundation (NSF)