Overview: Psychology

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

To counter disinformation and revalue quality journalism we need a competitive ecosystem of credibility indexes to stimulate innovation and avoid a Ministry of Truth, de facto or otherwise.- more on Medium

we found that there were four ways the original disputed flags experience could be improved... Disputed flags buried critical information ... could sometimes backfire... Requiring two false ratings slowed down our ability to provide additional context and often meant that we weren’t able to do so at all.... We only applied Disputed flags to “fa…

Technology is hijacking our minds and society.... we are advancing thoughtful solutions to change the system... Try these simple changes to live more intentionally with your devices.

When in doubt, blame the robots. Facebook ... has proposed a familiar solution: f the algorithm has failed, let’s just build a better algorithm.... the focus on the software misses the point ... the Internet has failed as a public forum.... Perhaps we wouldn’t still be defending this failed experiment if it wasn’t so stunningly profitable... highl…

The name of my first series is AntiTech... We devised technology to live better, but its meteoric rise over the last decade has turned us into slaves of our own creations. Now, the only good tools left are those that render all other tools unnecessary. We must fight our way through the jungle of tech to find them and get back what we lost: our tim…

these technologies ... kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking... wears down certain capacities, like willpower... repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points... over twice ... that ... from long-term marijuana usage....…

uses the social network to promote her business... set up various safeguards to avoid becoming too emotionally invested ... a web browser plug-in ... replaces the social network’s endless stream ... with a single inspiring quote.... hired a social media manager ... because she could no longer stand the addictive feedback loop ... She had been a …

The work of researchers, designers, and artists ... includes apps, Chrome extensions, and desktop software... to give users some agency over their online lives.... understand the kind of information the platform may have on you... turn to Data Selfie... Matias’s posts include instructions on how to run your own Facebook audit... Chrome extensions …

Milner, Facebook’s UK policy director, asked if Cambridge Analytica had Facebook data, told MPs... it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided...when you understand the difference between Facebook’s internal data and data collected o…

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating ``echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views ... We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-tre…

the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence... While it also used demographic segments to identify groups of voters... Cambridge Analytica also segmented using psychographics... demographics are informational. Psychographics are behaviour…

Wylie ... the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.... In 2014 Steve Bannon ... was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer... Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor... to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then t…

A library, organised by topic

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.... insidious. It affects every choice you make. Every. Single. Day. ... without you noticing. Confirmation bias affects you in 3 ways... Why? You seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong ... means you’re not …

a similar kind of rumor kept showing up... after each of the man-made crisis events — a conspiracy theory or 'alternative narrative' ... claimed it either didn't happen or that it was perpetrated by someone other than the current suspects... the role that botnets play in disseminating alternative narratives ... What's different about the Parkland …

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

aimed to find new ways to help verified facts reach the widest possible audience. The competition sought creative solutions that newsrooms can adopt to take fact-checking beyond long-form explanations and bullet points.... selected teams from Argentina, Italy, Georgia and Mexico as the winners. ·

the backfire effect can be hard to replicate in rigorous research... a large-scale, peer-reviewed study ... couldn't reproduce the high-profile 2010 study . ... The trouble is that even when we learn that something is false, we may be able to acknowledge those facts without changing our political position accordingly

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

crowdsourced trustworthiness ratings are actually much less effective if they exclude the ratings from people who are unfamiliar with a given site. Which is what Facebook plans to do.. “a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness... Excluding ratings from participants who aren’t familiar with a given news source ... “dramatical…

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

Google is suspending a search feature that displayed fact checks associated to publishers after receiving criticism from conservative news outlets.... Reviewed Claims column that matched outlets’ disputed claims with fact checks contributed by independent fact-checking organizations to the Schema.org ClaimReview markup... The Daily Caller publishe…

it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback... trust rankings will emerge from surveys ... Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations... Facebook learned the wrong lesson fro…

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

a lot of psychology and other social science studies... participants are overwhelming Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries... not only are they WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit.... from countries that represent only about 12 percent …

my team and I studied how people use different information when it comes to voting... presented voters with ... “Public information” was seen by everyone and referred to as “expert”. “Private information” was given to individuals and referred to “personal opinion”... with a probability of it being correct,... They followed their personal informa…

The scientists asked the volunteers to perform a creative thinking task as they lay inside a brain scanner... strong connectivity between three networks of the brain... default mode network, is linked to spontaneous thinking and mind wandering... executive control network, is engaged when people focus in on their thoughts... salience network, help…

“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.