While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g. learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For example, could design or framing choices interact with viewers' social cognitive biases in ways that promote political polarization? When reporting on U.S. attitudes toward public policies, it is popular to highlight the gap between Democrats and Republicans (e.g. with blue vs red connected dot plots). But these charts may encourage social-normative conformity, influencing viewers' attitudes to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. We conducted three experiments examining visualization framing in the context of social conformity and polarization. Crowdworkers viewed charts showing simulated polling results for public policy proposals. We varied framing (aggregating data as non-partisan “All US Adults,” or partisan “Democrat” / “Republican”) and the visualized groups' support levels. Participants then reported their own support for each policy. We found that participants' attitudes biased significantly toward the group attitudes shown in the stimuli and this can increase inter-party attitude divergence. These results demonstrate that data visualizations can induce social conformity and accelerate political polarization. Choosing to visualize partisan divisions can divide us further.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 13, 2025
Bridging or Breaking: Impact of Intergroup Interactions on Religious Polarization
While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important events affect polarization between majority and minority groups in social networks. We compile data on the religious identity of nearly 700,000 Indian Twitter users engaging in COVID-19-related discourse during 2020. We introduce a new measure for an individual's group conformity based on contextualized embeddings of tweet text, which helps us assess polarization between religious groups. We then use a meta-learning framework to examine heterogeneous treatment effects of intergroup interactions on an individual's group conformity in the light of communal, political, and socio-economic events. We find that for political and social events, intergroup interactions reduce polarization. This decline is weaker for individuals at the extreme who already exhibit high conformity to their group. In contrast, during communal events, intergroup interactions can increase group conformity. Finally, we decompose the differential effects across religious groups in terms of emotions and topics of discussion. The results show that the dynamics of religious polarization are sensitive to the context and have important implications for understanding the role of intergroup interactions.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2047899
- PAR ID:
- 10525864
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400701719
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2672 to 2683
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Singapore Singapore
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
more » « less
Abstract 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 of agreement on its strength and prevalence. We measure affective polarization on social media by quantifying the emotions and toxicity of reply interactions. We demonstrate that, as predicted by affective polarization, interactions between users with same ideology (in-group replies) tend to be positive, while interactions between opposite-ideology users (out-group replies) are characterized by negativity and toxicity. Second, we show that affective polarization generalizes beyond the in-group/out-group dichotomy and can be considered a structural property of social networks. Specifically, we show that emotions vary with network distance between users, with closer interactions eliciting positive emotions and more distant interactions leading to anger, disgust, and toxicity. Finally, we show that similar information exhibits different dynamics when spreading in emotionally polarized groups. These findings are consistent across diverse datasets spanning discussions on topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic and abortion in the US. Our research provides insights into the complex social dynamics of affective polarization in the digital age and its implications for political discourse.
-
more » « less
In a secularizing world, religious groups are increasingly threatened by anti‐religious groups. We present two studies investigating religious peoples’ responses to anti‐religious threats. We expected intergroup threats to shape group‐based emotions and behavioural intentions through a novel pathway whereby threat affects group‐based meta‐emotions: the ingroup’s perception of the outgroup’s emotions towards the ingroup. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated threat and group salience with participants from two different cultures (British and Latinx/Hispanic). Study 1 demonstrated non‐interactive effects of threat increasing negative emotional responses and of group salience strengthening emotional responses. The results illustrated the role of group‐based meta‐emotions in predicting outgroup‐directed emotions and behavioural response intentions. Study 2 used a different manipulation of threat in an American sample and an identity‐based manipulation of salience to assess the impact of real‐world anti‐religious campaigns involving symbolic and realistic threats. Both threat types increased negative group‐based meta‐emotions, negative outgroup‐directed emotions, desire to respond, and opposition to the anti‐religious campaign compared to no threat. Overall, religious identity salience had little impact on outcomes. The indirect pathway through meta‐emotion replicated, suggesting the importance of considering this novel meta‐emotion pathway in intergroup relations.
-
Humanity for centuries has perfected skills of interpersonal interactions and evolved patterns that enable people to detect lies and deceiving behavior of others in face-to-face settings. Unprecedented growth of people’s access to mobile phones and social media raises an important question: How does this new technology influence people’s interactions and support the use of traditional patterns? In this article, we answer this question for homophily-driven patterns in social media. In our previous studies, we found that, on a university campus, changes in student opinions were driven by the desire to hold popular opinions. Here, we demonstrate that the evolution of online platform-wide opinion groups is driven by the same desire. We focus on two social media: Twitter and Parler, on which we tracked the political biases of their users. On Parler, an initially stable group of Right-biased users evolved into a permanent Right-leaning echo chamber dominating weaker, transient groups of members with opposing political biases. In contrast, on Twitter, the initial presence of two large opposing bias groups led to the evolution of a bimodal bias distribution, with a high degree of polarization. We capture the movement of users from the initial to final bias groups during the tracking period. We also show that user choices are influenced by side-effects of homophily. Users entering the platform attempt to find a sufficiently large group whose members hold political biases within the range sufficiently close to their own. If successful, they stabilize their biases and become permanent members of the group. Otherwise, they leave the platform. We believe that the dynamics of users’ behavior uncovered in this article create a foundation for technical solutions supporting social groups on social media and socially aware networksmore » « less
-
Religious beliefs, practices, and social support facilitate coping with psychologically distressful events and circumstances. However, COVID-19 and governmental mandates for social distancing and isolation make in-person communal forms of religious coping difficult. While some congregations began holding virtual rituals, this was not an option for Amish and conservative Mennonite groups that restrict communication and media technologies as a religious sacrament. Governmental mandates placed a disproportionate burden on these groups whose members could not conduct rituals or interact virtually with other members and family. What religious coping strategies did the Amish and Mennonites use to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic given their restricted ability to participate in in-person rituals? We collected data from The Budget and The Diary, two Amish and Mennonite correspondence newspapers, which provide information on the experiences of community members. We content analyzed all entries from March 2020 to April 2020 and identified several themes related to religious coping focused on the positive benefits of the pandemic, specifically how it helps and reminds the Amish and Mennonites to refocus on the simple and important things in life, including God, spirituality, family, tradition, gardening, and other at-home hobbies, all of which reflect their religious commitment to a slower pace of life.more » « less
