Profs and Pints Online presents: “Social Media and Polarization,” a research-based look at how Facebook and other social-media sites have reshaped American democracy, with Jaime Settle, associate professor of government and director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at the College of William & Mary.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

Scholars debate whether Facebook and other social-media sites have radically changed our nation’s political climate, fueling partisanship and polarization. But why and how, exactly, might this have happened, and what can be done about it?

Get answers to such questions from Dr. Jaime Settle, a leading researcher on the subject. Employing tools from fields such as behavior genetics, psychophysiology, and data science, she has looked in depth at how both face-to-face and online political interactions influence how people perceive their environment, evaluate others, and engage within the political system. Her insights might change how you view and use social media and give you a much better sense of the promise and perils of social media for a healthy democracy.

After assessing the broad landscape about what we know about the relationship between various social-media platforms and political polarization, Dr. Settle will take us on a deep dive into what’s known about the political impact of Facebook and sites like it. She’ll show how people make inferences about the political views of their social connections based even on apolitical content, and often attribute unwarranted ideological coherence and extremity to partisans on the other side of the aisle. She’ll describe how features embedded within the Facebook site further exacerbate these cognitive biases, leading people to believe that their own opinions are in the majority. And she’ll discuss how using Facebook users are more judgmental about the political competence of the people with whom they disagree, perceive more social differences between members of the two political parties, and are more likely to preferentially select co-partisans as friends.

Among the questions she’ll tackle: Were the 60 million Americans who logged onto Facebook on election day more likely to vote if they were nudged by a message that included social information? Do people become less polarized if you pay them to stop using Facebook?  How can it be the case that 75% of Americans say they never post about politics on Facebook, yet everyone seems to know their Facebook friends’ political identities?  Are we better off blocking, or tolerating, the member of our high school class whose opinion we hate?

To borrow common Facebook terminology: You’ll “like” the talk so much you’ll want to “share” what you learned with your “friends.”

Profs & Pints Online: Social Media and Polarization