More Like this

1. Cues to gender and racial identity reduce creativity in diverse social networks

   Baten, Raiyan; Aslin, Richard; Ghoshal, Gourab; Hoque, Ehsan (May 2021, Scientific reports)

   null (Ed.)

   The characteristics of social partners have long been hypothesized as influential in guiding group interactions. Understanding how demographic cues impact networks of creative collaborators is critical for elevating creative performances therein. We conducted a randomized experiment to investigate how the knowledge of peers’ gender and racial identities distorts people’s connection patterns and the resulting creative outcomes in a dynamic social network. Consistent with prior work, we found that creative inspiration links are primarily formed with top idea-generators. However, when gender and racial identities are known, not only is there (1) an increase of 82.03% in the odds of same-gender connections to persist (but not for same-race connections), but (2) the semantic similarity of idea-sets stimulated by these connections also increase significantly compared to demography-agnostic networks, negatively impacting the outcomes of divergent creativity. We found that ideas tend to be significantly more homogeneous within demographic groups than between, taking away diversity-bonuses from similarity-based links and partly explaining the results. These insights can inform intelligent interventions to enhance network-wide creative performances. 

   more » « less
2. Novel idea generation in social networks is optimized by exposure to a “Goldilocks” level of idea-variability

   https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac255  

   Baten, Raiyan Abdul; Aslin, Richard N; Ghoshal, Gourab; Hoque, Ehsan (November 2022, PNAS Nexus)

   Nelson, Karen (Ed.)

   Abstract Recent works suggest that striking a balance between maximizing idea stimulation and minimizing idea redundancy can elevate novel idea generation performances in self-organizing social networks. We explore whether dispersing the visibility of high-performing idea generators can help achieve such a trade-off. We employ popularity signals (follower counts) of participants as an external source of variation in network structures, which we control across four conditions in a randomized setting. We observe that popularity signals influence inspiration-seeking ties, partly by biasing people’s perception of their peers’ novel idea-generation performances. Networks that partially disperse the top ideators’ visibility using this external signal show reduced idea redundancy and elevated idea-generation performances. However, extreme dispersal leads to inferior performances by narrowing the range of idea stimulation. Our work holds future-of-work implications for elevating idea generation performances of people. 

   more » « less
3. Supporting Youth Activists’ Strategic Use of Social Media: A Qualitative Investigation of Design Opportunities

   Irannejad Bisafar, Farnaz; Foucault Welles, Brooke; D’ignazio, Catherine; Parker, Andrea G. (January 2020, Proceedings of the ACM on humancomputer interaction)

   Social Networking Sites (SNS) provide a platform for engaging youth in activism (e.g., by helping mobilize civic action). While youth typically employ casual approaches to online activism (i.e., quick actions, such as broadcast posts to advertise social justice events), more strategic practices (i.e., those that are more creative and informed) can increase the likelihood of successful online campaigns. However, little work has examined how youth activists can be supported to use SNS more strategically. To address this research gap, we conducted interviews with youth activists, exploring how youth made sense of social network visualizations and their perspectives on how such tools could support their activism efforts. Our findings characterize how participants made inferences about followers’ identities based on their hashtag use, and how they used those inferences in outreach decisions. We conclude with design implications for future research in this area. 

   more » « less
4. In-degree centrality in a social network is linked to coordinated neural activity

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28432-3  

   Baek, Elisa C.; Hyon, Ryan; López, Karina; Finn, Emily S.; Porter, Mason A.; Parkinson, Carolyn (December 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Convergent processing of the world may be a factor that contributes to social connectedness. We use neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate the association between the social-network position (as measured by in-degree centrality) of first-year university students and their neural similarity while watching naturalistic audio-visual stimuli (specifically, videos). There were 119 students in the social-network study; 63 of them participated in the neuroimaging study. We show that more central individuals had similar neural responses to their peers and to each other in brain regions that are associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more variable responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings show that neural processing of external stimuli is similar in highly-central individuals but is idiosyncratic in less-central individuals. 

   more » « less
5. TunePad Playbooks: Designing Computational Notebooks for Creative Music Coding

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502021  

   Horn, Mike; Banerjee, Amartya; Brucker, Matthew (April 2022, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'22))

   This paper describes the design of an online learning platform that empowers musical creation and performance with Python code. For this platform we have developed an innovative computational note- book paradigm that we call TunePad playbooks. While playbooks borrow ideas from popular computational notebooks like Jupyter, we have designed them from the ground up to support creative mu- sical expression including live performances. After discussing our design principles and features, we share findings from a series of artifact-centered interviews conducted with experienced TunePad users. Our results show how systems like ours might flexibly sup- port a variety of creative workflows, while suggesting opportunities for future work in this area. 

   more » « less