Apology psychology: Breaking gender stereotypes leads to more effective communication

From social media to the workplace, non-stereotypical apologies can help repair trust, according to new study involving a University of Arizona researcher.

Saying "I'm sorry," especially in the workplace, can be tricky terrain. Delivering an effective apology can help resolve conflicts, restore trust and promote collaboration among coworkers.

But what works best?

A research team including a University of Arizona faculty member says that to make your next apology more effective, use language that goes against gender stereotypes.

Sarah Doyle, associate professor in the Department of Management and Organizations in the Eller College of Management, said the team wanted to find out what constitutes an effective apology in the workplace -- and whether the content of a successful apology looks different depending on the gender of the apologizer. The research was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The team used past research to define "masculine" and "feminine" language, including a study from 2003 that defined masculine language as having more agency and being more assertive, confident and self-assured, and feminine language as warm, communal and nurturing. The team labeled apologies with more masculine language as "agentic," and those with more feminine language as "communal." Overall, Doyle's team found that those who "violated" gender stereotypes were seen as delivering more effective apologies.

"We found that women delivering masculine-style apologies benefited because they were seen as displaying higher levels of assertiveness and enhancing their perceived competence," Doyle said. "The men delivering apologies with more stereotypically feminine language were seen as having greater interpersonal sensitivity that enhanced their perceived benevolence or warmth."

Starting with celebrities

The team began its series of four studies by searching through a platform that is a well-known hotspot for celebrity apologies: X, formerly known as Twitter. They ultimately examined 87 apology tweets from celebrities, including rapper and singer Lizzo, comedian Kevin Hart, actor Tyler Posey and television personality Kendra Wilkinson. Public reaction to those tweets supported the idea of apologizers benefiting by violating gender stereotypes, especially for the women in the sample, Doyle said.

"The female celebrities who delivered apologies that were higher in these masculine qualities were especially likely to receive these benefits," Doyle said. "There were higher 'like' counts and the sentiments in response to those apology tweets were much more positive."

For women delivering an apology on the platform, a one-point increase in agentic language, as measured on a five-point scale, returned an average of more than 17,000 additional likes, Doyle said.

Everyday apologies

In the second study, 366 working adults participated in a scenario in which their accountant sends them an email apologizing for making a mistake on their taxes. Individuals were randomly assigned to one of four groups classified by a male or female accountant delivering a stereotypically masculine or feminine apology. Participants then rated different components of the apology and determined whether they would like to continue using the accountant. The data lined up with the results from the first study, showing, for both male and female apologizers, that the counter-stereotypical apology was more effective.

The third study involved 441 individuals participating in the same accounting scenario but asked them to respond to the accountant's apology and determine whether they wanted to keep working with them. The fourth study was similar to the third, but used a scenario involving a paperwork error by a nurse to see if using a more traditionally female occupation would change the results. The data from each study showed counter-stereotypical apologies were seen as more effective, especially for female apologizers.

Across the studies using the accounting or nursing scenarios, researchers found that, for women, delivering a counter-stereotypical apology increased the apology's perceived effectiveness by an average of 9.7%. For men, using a counter-stereotypical apology increased perceived effectiveness by an average of 8.2%.

"It's important to mention that we did not find that men and women are penalized for giving a stereotypical apology," Doyle said, "Rather, they benefit from giving a counter-stereotypical one. Thus, any apology is likely to be better than no apology at all."

Sorry to ask, but what did we learn?

Put simply, there are a lot of different ways to apologize, and it can help to think it through, Doyle said.

"I think people assume that 'I'm sorry' is a consistent and effective way to apologize, but there are a lot of different ways to say that," Doyle explained. "Not all apologies are the same, and it can help to be a little bit more deliberate about the language that you're using and the content that is included in your apology."

The research team is hoping the results can lead people to think beyond how often we apologize, and to put more focus on how we communicate.

"Much of the literature suggests women apologize too much and men don't apologize enough," Doyle said. "But I think the frequency conversation is a bit oversimplified. It's not just about whether people should apologize more or less, but how we can construct apologies differently. It's what you include in that apology that's really going to matter."

Readm ore at Science Daily

Nature photographers posting to social media help with protecting biodiversity

Nature photographers posting to social media are helping improve biodiversity conservation mapping in South Asia, and the method could go global.

Dr Shawan Chowdhury from UQ's School of the Environment led an international team which scoured images on Facebook nature photography groups in Bangladesh, to add to the existing Global Biodiversity Information Facility database.

"We found 44,000 photos of almost 1,000 animal species, including many birds and insects, 288 of which are considered threatened in Bangladesh," Dr Chowdhury said.

"This has vastly improved habitat mapping across the country where only 4.6 per cent of land is designated as protected.

"We identified many more high-priority areas for conservation, spanning 4,000 square kilometres for birds and 10,000 square kilometres for butterflies.

"We'd been missing out on the distribution data of hundreds of endangered species in Bangladesh so this is a big result.

"This could change the way scientists gather biodiversity information in the future, especially in regions where there is a lack of reliable and up-to-date structured monitoring to inform conservation efforts."

In Australia, social media posts are being used to track pest species.

"A South Asian butterfly, called the tawny coster, entered Australia in 2012," Dr Chowdhury said.

"We've searched for additional locality records from Facebook to analyse the movement, ecology and colonisation status of this species and shown that it expanded at about 135 kilometres per year in Australia between 2012 and 2020."

Co-author Professor Richard Fuller from UQ said while Facebook had been helpful, there are some big opportunities for social media companies.

"There is currently no automated way to collect this information, and it was a very arduous task for us to do it manually." Professor Fuller said.

"We hope our research can inspire the development of technology such as an app that transfers biodiversity data posted on Facebook directly to the global biodiversity databases.

"This way, conservation scientists can easily access that data and use it."

Read more at Science Daily

ChatGPT is debunking myths on social media around vaccine safety, say experts

ChatGPT could help to increase vaccine uptake by debunking myths around jab safety, say the authors of a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics.

The researchers asked the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot the top 50 most frequently-asked Covid-19 vaccine questions. They included queries based on myths and fake stories such as the vaccine causing Long Covid.

Results show that ChatGPT scored nine out of 10 on average for accuracy. The rest of the time it was correct but left some gaps in the information provided, according to the study.

Based on these findings, experts who led the study from the GenPoB research group based at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria (IDIS) -- Hospital Clinico Universitario of Santiago de Compostela, say the AI tool is a "reliable source of non-technical information to the public," especially for people without specialist scientific knowledge.

However, the findings do highlight some concerns about the technology such as ChatGPT changing its answers in certain situations.

"Overall, ChatGPT constructs a narrative in line with the available scientific evidence, debunking myths circulating on social media," says lead author Antonio Salas, who as well as leading the GenPoB research group, is also a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain.

"Thereby it potentially facilitates an increase in vaccine uptake. ChatGPT can detect counterfeit questions related to vaccines and vaccination. The language this AI uses is not too technical and therefore easily understandable to the public but without losing scientific rigor.

"We acknowledge that the present-day version of ChatGPT cannot substitute an expert or scientific evidence. But the results suggest it could be a reliable source of information to the public."

In 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) listed vaccine hesitancy among the top 10 threats to global health.

During the pandemic, misinformation spread via social media contributed to public mistrust of Covid-19 vaccination.

The authors of this study include those from the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Santiago which the WHO designated as a vaccine safety collaborating center in 2018.

Researchers at the center have been exploring myths around vaccine safety and medical situations that are falsely believed to be a reason not to get vaccinated. These misplaced concerns contribute to vaccine hesitancy.

The study authors set out to test ChatGPT's ability to get the facts right and share accurate information around Covid vaccine safety in line with current scientific evidence.

ChatGPT enables people to have human-like conversations and interactions with a virtual assistant. The technology is very user-friendly which makes it accessible to a wide population.

However, many governments are concerned about the potential for ChatGPT to be used fraudulently in educational settings such as universities.

The study was designed to challenge the chatbot by asking it the questions most frequently received by the WHO collaborating center in Santiago.

The queries covered three themes. The first was misconceptions around safety such as the vaccine causing Long Covid. Next was false contraindications -- medical situations where the jab is safe to use such as in breastfeeding women.

The questions also related to true contraindications -- a health condition where the vaccine should not be used -- and cases where doctors must take precautions e.g. a patient with heart muscle inflammation.

Next, experts analyzed the responses then rated them for veracity and precision against current scientific evidence, and recommendations from WHO and other international agencies.

The authors say this was important because algorithms created by social media and internet search engines are often based on an individual's usual preferences. This may lead to 'biased or wrong answers', they add.

Results showed that most of the questions were answered correctly with an average score of nine out of 10 which is defined as 'excellent' or 'good'. The responses to the three question themes were on average 85.5% accurate or 14.5% accurate but with gaps in the information provided by ChatGPT.

ChatGPT provided correct answers to queries that arose from genuine vaccine myths, and to those considered in clinical recommendation guidelines to be false or true contraindications.

However, the research team does highlight ChatGPT's downsides in providing vaccine information.

Professor Salas, who specializes in human genetics, concludes: "Chat GPT provides different answers if the question is repeated 'with a few seconds of delay'.

"Another concern we have seen is that this AI tool, in its present version, could also be trained to provide answers not in line with scientific evidence.

"One can 'torture' the system in such a way that it will provide the desired answer. This is also true for other contexts different to vaccines. For instance, it might be possible to make the chatbot align with absurd narratives like the flat-earth theory, deny climate change, or object to the theory of evolution, just to give a few examples.

Read more at Science Daily

Social media algorithms exploit how humans learn from their peers

In prehistoric societies, humans tended to learn from members of our ingroup or from more prestigious individuals, as this information was more likely to be reliable and result in group success. However, with the advent of diverse and complex modern communities -- and especially in social media -- these biases become less effective. For example, a person we are connected to online might not necessarily be trustworthy, and people can easily feign prestige on social media. In a review published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science on August 3rd, a group of social scientists describe how the functions of social media algorithms are misaligned with human social instincts meant to foster cooperation, which can lead to large-scale polarization and misinformation.

"Several user surveys now both on Twitter and Facebook suggest most users are exhausted by the political content they see. A lot of users are unhappy, and there's a lot of reputational components that Twitter and Facebook must face when it comes to elections and the spread of misinformation," says first author William Brady, a social psychologist in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.

"We wanted to put out a systematic review that's trying to help understand how human psychology and algorithms interact in ways that can have these consequences," says Brady. "One of the things that this review brings to the table is a social learning perspective. As social psychologists, we're constantly studying how we can learn from others. This framework is fundamentally important if we want to understand how algorithms influence our social interactions."

Humans are biased to learn from others in a way that typically promotes cooperation and collective problem-solving, which is why they tend to learn more from individuals they perceive as a part of their ingroup and those they perceive to be prestigious. In addition, when learning biases were first evolving, morally and emotionally charged information was important to prioritize, as this information would be more likely to be relevant to enforcing group norms and ensuring collective survival.

In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content's accuracy or representativeness of a group's opinions. As a result, extreme political content or controversial topics are more likely to be amplified, and if users are not exposed to outside opinions, they might find themselves with a false understanding of the majority opinion of different groups.

"It's not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation," says Brady. "It's just that its goals are different. And in practice, when you put those functions together, you end up with some of these potentially negative effects."

To address this problem, the research group first proposes that social media users need to be more aware of how algorithms work and why certain content shows up on their feed. Social media companies don't typically disclose the full details of how their algorithms select for content, but one start might be offering explainers for why a user is being shown a particular post. For example, is it because the user's friends are engaging with the content or because the content is generally popular? Outside of social media companies, the research team is developing their own interventions to teach people how to be more conscious consumers of social media.

In addition, the researchers propose that social media companies could take steps to change their algorithms, so they are more effective at fostering community. Instead of solely favoring PRIME information, algorithms could set a limit on how much PRIME information they amplify and prioritize presenting users with a diverse set of content. These changes could continue to amplify engaging information while preventing more polarizing or politically extreme content from becoming overrepresented in feeds.

Read more at Science Daily

Social media experiment reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation

Short animations giving viewers a taste of the tactics behind misinformation can help to "inoculate" people against harmful content on social media when deployed in YouTube's advert slot, according to a major online experiment led by the University of Cambridge.

Working with Jigsaw (https://jigsaw.google.com/), a unit within Google dedicated to tackling threats to open societies, a team of psychologists from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol created 90-second clips designed to familiarise users with manipulation techniques such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence.

This "pre-bunking" strategy pre-emptively exposes people to tropes at the root of malicious propaganda, so they can better identify online falsehoods regardless of subject matter.

Researchers behind the Inoculation Science project (https://inoculation.science/) compare it to a vaccine: by giving people a "micro-dose" of misinformation in advance, it helps prevent them falling for it in future -- an idea based on what social psychologist's call "inoculation theory."

The findings, published in Science Advances, come from seven experiments involving a total of almost 30,000 participants -- including the first "real world field study" of inoculation theory on a social media platform -- and show a single viewing of a film clip increases awareness of misinformation.

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook," illustrated with relatable examples from film and TV such as Family Guy or, in the case of false dichotomies, Star Wars ("Only a Sith deals in absolutes").

"YouTube has well over 2 billion active users worldwide. Our videos could easily be embedded within the ad space on YouTube to prebunk misinformation," said study co-author Prof Sander van der Linden, Head of the Social Decision-Making Lab (SDML) at Cambridge, which led the work.

"Our research provides the necessary proof of concept that the principle of psychological inoculation can readily be scaled across hundreds of millions of users worldwide."

Lead author Dr Jon Roozenbeek from Cambridge's SDML describes the team's videos as "source agnostic," avoiding biases people have about where information is from, and how it chimes -- or not -- with what they already believe.

"Our interventions make no claims about what is true or a fact, which is often disputed. They are effective for anyone who does not appreciate being manipulated," he said.

"The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

Google -- YouTube's parent company -- is already harnessing the findings. At the end of August, Jigsaw will roll out a prebunking campaign across several platforms in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic to get ahead of emerging disinformation relating to Ukrainian refugees. The campaign is designed to build resilience to harmful anti-refugee narratives, in partnership with local NGOs, fact checkers, academics, and disinformation experts.

"Harmful misinformation takes many forms, but the manipulative tactics and narratives are often repeated and can therefore be predicted," said Beth Goldberg, co-author and Head of Research and Development for Google's Jigsaw unit.

"Teaching people about techniques like ad-hominem attacks that set out to manipulate them can help build resilience to believing and spreading misinformation in the future.

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

The team argue that pre-bunking may be more effective at fighting the misinformation deluge than fact-checking each untruth after it spreads -- the classic 'debunk' -- which is impossible to do at scale, and can entrench conspiracy theories by feeling like personal attacks to those who believe them.

"Propaganda, lies and misdirections are nearly always created from the same playbook," said co-author Prof Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol. "We developed the videos by analysing the rhetoric of demagogues, who deal in scapegoating and false dichotomies."

"Fact-checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online. We need to teach people to recognise the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled."

Six initial controlled experiments featured 6,464 participants, with the sixth experiment conducted a year after the first five to ensure earlier findings could be replicated.

Data collection for each participant was comprehensive, from basic information -- gender, age, education, political leanings -- to levels of numeracy, conspiratorial thinking, news and social media checking, "bullshit receptivity," and a personality inventory, among other "variables."

Factoring all this in, the team found that inoculation videos improved people's ability to spot misinformation, and boosted their confidence in being able to do so again. The clips also improve the quality of "sharing decisions": whether or not to spread damaging content.

Two of the animations were then tested "in the wild" as part of a vast experiment on YouTube, with clips positioned in the pre-video advert slot that provides an option to skip after five seconds.

Google Jigsaw exposed around 5.4 million US YouTubers to an inoculation video, with almost a million watching for at least 30 seconds. The platform then gave a random 30% of users that watched a voluntary test question within 24 hours of their initial viewing.

The clips aimed to inoculate against misinformation tactics of hyper-emotive language and use of false dichotomies, and the questions -- based on fictional posts -- tested for detection of these tropes. YouTube also gave a "control" group of users who had not viewed a video the same test question. In total, 22,632 users answered a question.

Despite the intense "noise" and distractions on YouTube, ability to recognise manipulation techniques at the heart of misinformation increased by 5% on average.

Google say the unprecedented nature of the experiment means there is no direct data comparison available. However, increases in brand awareness from advertising on YouTube -- known as "brand lift" -- are typically limited to 1% in surveys of under 45,000 users.

"Users participated in tests around 18 hours on average after watching the videos, so the inoculation appears to have stuck," said van der Linden.

Read more at Science Daily

Video games can help boost children's intelligence

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied how the screen habits of US children correlates with how their cognitive abilities develop over time. They found that the children who spent an above-average time playing video games increased their intelligence more than the average, while TV watching or social media had neither a positive nor a negative effect. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Children are spending more and more time in front of screens. How this affects their health and whether it has a positive or negative impact on their cognitive abilities are hotly debated. For this present study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam specifically studied the link between screen habits and intelligence over time.

Over 9,000 boys and girls in the USA participated in the study. At the age of nine or ten, the children performed a battery of psychological tests to gauge their general cognitive abilities (intelligence). The children and their parents were also asked about how much time the children spent watching TV and videos, playing video games and engaging with social media.

Followed up after two years

Just over 5,000 of the children were followed up after two years, at which point they were asked to repeat the psychological tests. This enabled the researchers to study how the children's performance on the tests varied from the one testing session to the other, and to control for individual differences in the first test. They also controlled for genetic differences that could affect intelligence and differences that could be related to the parents' educational background and income.

On average, the children spent 2.5 hours a day watching TV, half an hour on social media and 1 hour playing video games. The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence between the two measurements by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average. No significant effect was observed, positive or negative, of TV-watching or social media.

"We didn't examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can't say anything about that," says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. "But our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn't impair children's cognitive abilities, and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence. This is consistent with several experimental studies of video-game playing."

Intelligence is not constant

The results are also in line with recent research showing that intelligence is not a constant, but a quality that is influenced by environmental factors.

"We'll now be studying the effects of other environmental factors and how the cognitive effects relate to childhood brain development," says Torkel Klingberg.

One limitation of the study is that it only covered US children and did not differentiate between different types of video games, which makes the results difficult to transfer to children in other countries with other gaming habits. There was also a risk of reporting error since screen time and habits were self-rated.

Read more at Science Daily

New tool makes students better at detecting fake imagery and videos

 Researchers at Uppsala University have developed a digital self-test that trains users to assess news items, images and videos presented on social media. The self-test has also been evaluated in a scientific study, which confirmed the researchers' hypothesis that the tool genuinely improved the students' ability to apply critical thinking to digital sources.

The new tool and the scientific review of it are part of the News Evaluator project to investigate new methods of enhancing young people's capacity for critical awareness of digital sources, a key component of digital literacy.

"As research leader in the project, I'm surprised how complicated it is to develop this type of tool against misleading information -- one that's usable on a large scale. Obviously, critically assessing digital sources is complicated. We've been working on various designs and tests, with major experiments in school settings, for years. Now we've finally got a tool that evidently works. The effect is clearly positive and now we launch the self-test on our News Evaluator website http://www.newsevaluator.com, so that all anyone can test themselves for free," says Thomas Nygren, associate professor at Uppsala University.

The tool is structured in a way that allows students to work with it, online, on their own. They get to see news articles in a social-media format, with pictures or videos, and the task is to determine how credible they are. Is there really wood pulp in Parmesan cheese, for instance?

"The aim is for the students to get better at uncovering what isn't true, but also improve their understanding of what may be true even if it seems unlikely at first," Nygren says.

As user support, the tool contains guidance. Students can follow how a professional would have gone about investigating the authenticity of the statements or images -- by opening a new window and doing a separate search alongside the test, or doing a reverse image search, for example. The students are encouraged to learn "lateral reading" (verifying what you read by double checking news). After solving the tasks, the students get feedback on their performance.

When the tool was tested with just over 200 students' help, it proved to have had a beneficial effect on their ability to assess sources critically. Students who had received guidance and feedback from the tool showed distinctly better results than those who had not been given this support. The tool also turned out to provide better results in terms of the above-mentioned ability than other, comparable initiatives that require teacher participation and more time.

Read more at Science Daily

Seeing no longer believing: the manipulation of online images

 A peace sign from Martin Luther King, Jr, becomes a rude gesture; President Donald Trump's inauguration crowd scenes inflated; dolphins in Venice's Grand Canal; and crocodiles on the streets of flooded Townsville -- all manipulated images posted as truth.

Image editing software is so ubiquitous and easy to use, according to researchers from QUT's Digital Media Research Centre, it has the power to re-imagine history.

And, they say, deadline-driven journalists lack the tools to tell the difference, especially when the images come through from social media.

Their study, Visual mis/disinformation in journalism and public communications, has been published in Journalism Practice. It was driven by the increased prevalence of fake news and how social media platforms and news organisations are struggling to identify and combat visual mis/disinformation presented to their audiences.

"When Donald Trump's staff posted an image to his official Facebook page in 2019, journalists were able to spot the photoshopped edits to the president's skin and physique because an unedited version exists on the White House's official Flickr feed," said lead author Dr T.J. Thomson.

"But what about when unedited versions aren't available online and journalists can't rely on simple reverse-image searches to verify whether an image is real or has been manipulated?

"When it is possible to alter past and present images, by methods like cloning, splicing, cropping, re-touching or re-sampling, we face the danger of a re-written history -- a very Orwellian scenario."

Examples highlighted in the report include photos shared by news outlets last year of crocodiles on Townsville streets during a flood which were later shown to be images of alligators in Florida from 2014. It also quotes a Reuters employee on their discovery that a harrowing video shared during Cyclone Idai, which devastated parts of Africa in 2019, had been shot in Libya five years earlier.

An image of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's reaction to the US Senate's passing of the civil rights bill in 1964, was manipulated to make it appear that he was flipping the bird to the camera. This edited version was shared widely on Twitter, Reddit, and white supremacist website The Daily Stormer.

Dr Thomson, Associate Professor Daniel Angus, Dr Paula Dootson, Dr Edward Hurcombe, and Adam Smith have mapped journalists' current social media verification techniques and suggest which tools are most effective for which circumstances.

"Detection of false images is made harder by the number of visuals created daily -- in excess of 3.2 billion photos and 720,000 hours of video -- along with the speed at which they are produced, published, and shared," said Dr Thomson.

"Other considerations include the digital and visual literacy of those who see them. Yet being able to detect fraudulent edits masquerading as reality is critically important.

"While journalists who create visual media are not immune to ethical breaches, the practice of incorporating more user-generated and crowd-sourced visual content into news reports is growing. Verification on social media will have to increase commensurately if we wish to improve trust in institutions and strengthen our democracy."

Dr Thomson said a recent quantitative study performed by the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) found a very low usage of social media verification tools in newsrooms.

"The ICFJ surveyed over 2,700 journalists and newsroom managers in more than 130 countries and found only 11% of those surveyed used social media verification tools," he said.

"The lack of user-friendly forensic tools available and low levels of digital media literacy, combined, are chief barriers to those seeking to stem the tide of visual mis/disinformation online."

Associate Professor Angus said the study demonstrated an urgent need for better tools, developed with journalists, to provide greater clarity around the provenance and authenticity of images and other media.

"Despite knowing little about the provenance and veracity of the visual content they encounter, journalists have to quickly determine whether to re-publish or amplify this content," he said.

"The many examples of misattributed, doctored, and faked imagery attest to the importance of accuracy, transparency, and trust in the arena of public discourse. People generally vote and make decisions based on information they receive via friends and family, politicians, organisations, and journalists."

Read more at Science Daily

Red-flagging misinformation could slow the spread of fake news on social media

The dissemination of fake news on social media is a pernicious trend with dire implications for the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, research shows that public engagement with spurious news is greater than with legitimate news from mainstream sources, making social media a powerful channel for propaganda.

A new study on the spread of disinformation reveals that pairing headlines with credibility alerts from fact-checkers, the public, news media and even AI, can reduce peoples' intention to share. However, the effectiveness of these alerts varies with political orientation and gender. The good news for truth seekers? Official fact-checking sources are overwhelmingly trusted.

The study, led by Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Sameer Patil, visiting research professor at NYU Tandon and assistant professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, goes further, examining the effectiveness of a specific set of inaccuracy notifications designed to alert readers to news headlines that are inaccurate or untrue.

The work, "Effects of Credibility Indicators on Social Media News Sharing Intent," published in the Proceedings of the 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, involved an online study of around 1,500 individuals to measure the effectiveness among different groups of four so-called "credibility indicators" displayed beneath headlines:

• Fact Checkers: "Multiple fact-checking journalists dispute the credibility of this news"
• News Media: "Major news outlets dispute the credibility of this news"
• Public: "A majority of Americans disputes the credibility of this news"
• AI: "Computer algorithms using AI dispute the credibility of this news"

"We wanted to discover whether social media users were less apt to share fake news when it was accompanied by one of these indicators and whether different types of credibility indicators exhibit different levels of influence on people's sharing intent," says Memon. "But we also wanted to measure the extent to which demographic and contextual factors like age, gender, and political affiliation impact the effectiveness of these indicators."

Participants -- over 1,500 U.S. residents -- saw a sequence of 12 true, false, or satirical news headlines. Only the false or satirical headlines included a credibility indicator below the headline in red font. For all of the headlines, respondents were asked if they would share the corresponding article with friends on social media, and why.

"Upon initial inspection, we found that political ideology and affiliation were highly correlated to responses and that the strength of individuals' political alignments made no difference, whether Republican or Democrat," says Memon. "The indicators impacted everyone regardless of political orientation, but the impact on Democrats was much larger compared to the other two groups."

The most effective of the credibility indicators, by far, was Fact Checkers: Study respondents intended to share 43% fewer non-true headlines with this indicator versus 25%, 22%, and 22% for the "News Media," "Public," and "AI" indicators, respectively.

Effects of Political Affiliation

The team found a strong correlation between political affiliation and the propensity of each of the credibility indicators to influence intention to share. In fact, the AI credibility indicator actually induced Republicans to increase their intention to share non-true news:

• Democrats intended to share 61% fewer non-true headlines with the Fact Checkers indicator (versus 40% for Independents and 19% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 36% fewer non-true headlines with the News Media indicator (versus 29% for Independents and 4.5% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 37% fewer non-true headlines with the Public indicator, (versus 17% for Independents and 6.7% for Republicans)
• Democrats intended to share 40% fewer non-true headlines with the AI indicator (versus 16% for Independents)
• Republicans intended to share 8.1% more non-true news with the AI indicator

Republicans are less likely to be influenced by credibility indicators, more inclined to share fake news on social media.

Patil says that while fact-checkers are the most effective kind of indicator, regardless of political affiliation and gender, fact-checking is a very labor-intensive. He says the team was surprised by the fact that Republicans were more inclined to share news that was flagged as not credible using the AI indicator.

"We were not expecting that, although conservatives may tend to trust more traditional means of flagging the veracity of news," he says, adding that the team will next examine how to make the most effective credibility indicator -- fact-checkers -- efficient enough to handle the scale inherent in today's news climate.

"This could include applying fact checks to only the most-needed content, which might involve applying natural language algorithms. So, it is a question, broadly speaking, of how humans and AI could co-exist," he explains.

The team also found that males intended to share non-true headlines one and half times more than females, with the differences largest for the Public and News Media indicators.

Men are less likely to be influenced by credibility indicators, more inclined to share fake news on social media. But indicators, especially those from fact-checkers, reduce intention to share fake news across the board.

Read more at Science Daily

Time on screens has little impact on kids' social skills

Despite the time spent with smartphones and social media, young people today are just as socially skilled as those from the previous generation, a new study suggests.

Researchers compared teacher and parent evaluations of children who started kindergarten in 1998 -- six years before Facebook launched -- with those who began school in 2010, when the first iPad debuted.

Results showed both groups of kids were rated similarly on interpersonal skills such as the ability to form and maintain friendships and get along with people who are different. They were also rated similarly on self-control, such as the ability to regulate their temper.

In other words, the kids are still all right, said Douglas Downey, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

"In virtually every comparison we made, either social skills stayed the same or actually went up modestly for the children born later," Downey said.

"There's very little evidence that screen exposure was problematic for the growth of social skills."

Downey conducted the study with Benjamin Gibbs, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University. The study was just published online in the American Journal of Sociology.

The idea for the study came several years ago when Downey had an argument at a pizza restaurant with his son, Nick, about whether social skills had declined among the new generation of youth.

"I started explaining to him how terrible his generation was in terms of their social skills, probably because of how much time they spent looking at screens," Downey said.

"Nick asked me how I knew that. And when I checked there really wasn't any solid evidence."

So Downey, with his colleague, decided to investigate. For their study, they used data from The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which is run by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

The ECLS follows children from kindergarten to fifth grade. The researchers compared data on the ECLS-K cohort that included children who began kindergarten in 1998 (19,150 students) with the cohort that began kindergarten in 2010 (13,400 students).

Children were assessed by teachers six times between the start of kindergarten and the end of fifth grade. They were assessed by parents at the beginning and end of kindergarten and the end of first grade.

Downey and Gibbs focused mostly on the teacher evaluations, because they followed children all the way to fifth grade, although the results from parents were comparable.

Results showed that from the teachers' perspective, children's social skills did not decline between the 1998 and 2010 groups. And similar patterns persisted as the children progressed to fifth grade.

In fact, teachers' evaluations of children's interpersonal skills and self-control tended to be slightly higher for those in the 2010 cohort than those in the 1998 group, Downey said.

Even children within the two groups who had the heaviest exposure to screens showed similar development in social skills compared to those with little screen exposure, results showed.

There was one exception: Social skills were slightly lower for children who accessed online gaming and social networking sites many times a day.

"But even that was a pretty small effect," Downey said.

"Overall, we found very little evidence that the time spent on screens was hurting social skills for most children."

Downey said while he was initially surprised to see that time spent on screens didn't affect social skills, he really shouldn't have been.

"There is a tendency for every generation at my age to start to have concerns about the younger generation. It is an old story," he said.

These worries often involve "moral panic" over new technology, Downey explained. Adults are concerned when technological change starts to undermine traditional relationships, particularly the parent-child relationship.

"The introduction of telephones, automobiles, radio all led to moral panic among adults of the time because the technology allowed children to enjoy more autonomy," he said.

"Fears over screen-based technology likely represent the most recent panic in response to technological change."

If anything, new generations are learning that having good social relationships means being able to communicate successfully both face-to-face and online, Downey said.

Read more at Science Daily

How social media makes it difficult to identify real news

There's a price to pay when you get your news and political information from the same place you find funny memes and cat pictures, new research suggests.

The study found that people viewing a blend of news and entertainment on a social media site tended to pay less attention to the source of content they consumed -- meaning they could easily mistake satire or fiction for real news.

People who viewed content that was clearly separated into categories -- such as current affairs and entertainment -- didn't have the same issues evaluating the source and credibility of content they read.

The findings show the dangers of people getting their news from social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, said study author George Pearson, a senior lecturer and research associate in communication at The Ohio State University.

"We are drawn to these social media sites because they are one-stop shops for media content, updates from friends and family, and memes or cat pictures," Pearson said.

"But that jumbling of content makes everything seem the same to us. It makes it harder for us to distinguish what we need to take seriously from that which is only entertainment."

The study appears online in the journal New Media & Society.

For the study, Pearson created a fictional social media site called "Link Me." The 370 participants saw four webpages with either two or four posts each. Each post consisted of a headline and short paragraph summarizing the story, as well as information on the source of the post.

The sources were designed to be either high or low credibility, based on their name and description. (The sources' credibility was tested in a previous study to make sure people understood.)

For example, one high-credibility source was called "Washington Daily News" and was described as a "professional news organization renowned for high-quality and objective journalism."

One low-credibility source in the study was called "Hot Moon" and described as "a collective of nonprofessional writers."

All posts were based on real articles or public social media posts taken from Reddit or Tumblr.

After viewing the site, participants were asked a variety of questions. Pearson was most interested in whether they paid more attention to the posts about current affairs topics than those in other categories, such as entertainment.

"That would suggest that they were paying attention to the sources of the posts and understanding what was news and what was not," Pearson said.

The results showed that when the content was not grouped by distinct topics -- in other words, news posts appeared on the same page with entertainment posts -- participants reported paying less attention to the source of the content.

"They were less likely to verify source information to ensure that it was a credible source," he said.

That may be one reason why satirical and other types of fake news get shared by people who evidently think it is real, Pearson said.

For example, in 2018 the website React365 posted an article about a cruise ship disaster in Mexico that killed at least 32 people. The article generated more than 350,000 engagements on Facebook.

The misinformation was quickly debunked by Snopes.com, which noted that react365's homepage clearly showed it was a prank website where people could upload their own fictitious stories.

Pearson said one of the problems is that many social media sites present content in the exact same way, no matter the source.

"There is no visual distinction on Facebook between something from the New York Times and something from a random blog. They all have the same color scheme, same font," he said.

One solution would be for social media companies to develop tools to distinguish content.

But until that happens, it is up to users to pay more attention to where their news is coming from -- as difficult as that may be, Pearson said.

Read more at Science Daily

Fake news feels less immoral to share when we've seen it before

People who repeatedly encounter a fake news item may feel less and less unethical about sharing it on social media, even when they don't believe the information, research indicates.

In a series of experiments involving more than 2,500 people, Daniel A. Effron, a London Business School associate professor of organizational behavior, and Medha Raj, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, found that seeing a fake headline just once leads individuals to temper their disapproval of the misinformation when they see it a second, third, or fourth time.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, have important implications for policymakers and social media companies trying to curb the spread of misinformation online, Effron says.

"We suggest that efforts to fight misinformation should consider how people judge the morality of spreading it, not just whether they believe it," he says.

Across five experiments, Effron and Raj asked online survey participants to rate how unethical or acceptable they thought it would be to publish a fake headline, and how likely they would be to "like," share, and block or unfollow the person who posted it.

As they expected, the researchers found that participants rated headlines they had seen more than once as less unethical to publish than headlines they were shown for the first time. Participants also said they were more likely to "like" and share a previously seen headline and less likely to block or unfollow the person who posted it. What's more, they did not rate previously seen headline as significantly more accurate than new ones.

"Thus, our main results cannot be explained by a tendency to misremember false headlines as true," the researchers write.

Effron and Raj note that efforts to curtail misinformation typically focus on helping people distinguish fact from fiction. Facebook, for example, has tried informing users when they try to share news that fact-checkers have flagged as false. But such strategies may fail if users feel more comfortable sharing misinformation they know is fake when they have seen it before.

The researchers theorize that repeating misinformation lends it a "ring of truthfulness" that can increase people's tendency to give it a moral pass, regardless of whether they believe it. Merely imagining misinformation as if it were true can have a similar effect. Effron's earlier research shows that people are more likely to excuse a blatant falsehood after imagining how it could have been true if the past had been different.

"The results should be of interest to citizens of contemporary democracies," Effron adds. "Misinformation can stoke political polarization and undermine democracy, so it is important for people to understand when and why it spreads."

Read more at Science Daily

Use of social media is taking place both online and offline

Social media has changed how people interact. However, social media use is neither static or specifically linked to certain platforms. Emerging technical capabilities, changes in lifestyle and time management as well as the increasing possibilities to engage in online and offline interaction simultaneously affect our use of social media. Those are some of the results from a new doctoral thesis on Instagram and social media from University of Gothenburg.

In her studies, PhD-student Beata Jungselius, has been focusing on Instagram use and conducted interviews with a group of users in 2012, while five years later returning to that same group of instagrammers to understand how their use of both Instagram as well as social media in general has changed over time.

"These kinds of studies, where researchers analyze users' own descriptions of their social media use over time are very rare. By returning to and conducting in-depth interviews with the same informants in different stages of their lives, with their varied lifestyles, occupations and family situations, I have managed to get access to their own reflections on what has affected their behaviors, attitudes and perceptions of social media over time," she says.

One of the most central factors that regulate how people use social media is related to changes in lifestyle and management of time.

"Some users described tensions within their use. For instance, someone described that on one hand she uses social media more now, but on the other hand, she is less active when doing so. Some explained that this, being less active now in terms of how they interact and post photos, has to do with having less time because of work, kids and family. Others described sort of a moral tension, as in wanting to keep up and engage with friends, but also striving to not be a person who is always on their phone," says Beata Jungselius.

Another prominent change in how people use social media has to do with privacy preferences.

"It is clear that people have moved towards keeping conversations more private. A lot of the interaction that was previously public is now taking place in closed forums, such as via direct messages, through chats or in closed groups," Jungselius says.

The changes in technical capabilities has also had an effect on use of social media platforms as the possibilities to communicate and interact had increased in 2017. In 2012, users had a more limited set of interactional resources to rely upon. In 2017, the users had access to a greater array of modes and could express themselves through text, photo and video, GIFs and stickers. In 2012 the platforms where more diversified where each and every one had their special feature, while today, all major social media platforms provide similar features.

Use of social media is always taking place in a larger context. Interaction on one social media platform is usually situated within a larger use, where the interaction evolves over different platforms. Also, according to Jungselius, users engage in a number of social media practices that are not always visible at first glance. Apart from producing, posting and interacting with content, users plan their own production and monitor other users and relate to social media even when not actively engaging with their phone. Usually, people engage in these activities simultaneously.

"Platforms become social as people interact on them. The more accustomed they become with these practices, the better they get at using them and are able to switch seamlessly between them. They monitor and reflect upon the feedback they get on their postings and take this feedback into account when planning their future activities. When using social media, users develop both technical and social skills. They become skilled social media users," says Beata Jungselius.

As we are constantly connected today, social media users develop an ability to be more or less present in an online context while interacting with someone between four eyes.

Read more at Science Daily

First of its kind mapping model tracks how hate spreads and adapts online

Online hate thrives globally through self-organized, scalable clusters that interconnect to form resilient networks spread across multiple social media platforms, countries and languages, according to new research published today in the journal Nature. Researchers at the George Washington University developed a mapping model, the first of its kind, to track how these online hate clusters thrive. They believe it could help social media platforms and law enforcement in the battle against hate online.

With the explosion of social media, individuals are able to connect with other likeminded people in a matter of a few clicks. Clusters of those with common interests form readily and easily. Recently, online hate ideologies and extremist narratives have been linked to a surge in crimes around the world. To thwart this, researchers led by Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at GW, set out to better understand how online hate evolves and if it can be stopped.

"Hate destroys lives, not only as we've seen in El Paso, Orlando and New Zealand, but psychologically through online bullying and rhetoric," Dr. Johnson said. "We set out to get to the bottom of online hate by looking at why it is so resilient and how it can be better tackled. Instead of love being in the air, we found hate is in the ether."

To understand how hate evolves online, the team began by mapping how clusters interconnect to spread their narratives and attract new recruits. Focusing on social media platforms Facebook and its central European counterpart, VKontakte, the researchers started with a given hate cluster and looked outward to find a second one that was strongly connected to the original. They discovered that hate crosses boundaries of specific internet platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp; geographic location, including the United States, South Africa and parts of Europe; and languages, including English and Russian.

The researchers saw clusters creating new adaptation strategies in order to regroup on other platforms and/or reenter a platform after being banned. For example, clusters can migrate and reconstitute on other platforms or use different languages to avoid detection. This allows the cluster to quickly bring back thousands of supporters to a platform on which they have been banned and highlights the need for crossplatform cooperation to limit online hate groups.

"The analogy is no matter how much weed killer you place in a yard, the problem will come back, potentially more aggressively. In the online world, all yards in the neighborhood are interconnected in a highly complex way -- almost like wormholes. This is why individual social media platforms like Facebook need new analysis such as ours to figure out new approaches to push them ahead of the curve," Dr. Johnson said.

The team, which included researchers at the University of Miami, used insights from its online hate mapping to develop four intervention strategies that social media platforms could immediately implement based on situational circumstances:

• Reduce the power and number of large clusters by banning the smaller clusters that feed into them.
• Attack the Achilles' heel of online hate groups by randomly banning a small fraction of individual users in order to make the global cluster network fall a part.
• Pit large clusters against each other by helping anti-hate clusters find and engage directly with hate clusters.
• Set up intermediary clusters that engage hate groups to help bring out the differences in ideologies between them and make them begin to question their stance.

The researchers noted each of their strategies can be adopted on a global scale and simultaneously across all platforms without having to share the sensitive information of individual users or commercial secrets, which has been a stumbling block before.

Read more at Science Daily