Moral grandstanding (using moral & political discourse to gain social status) is associated with stronger affective polarization due to dichotomous thinking--seeing complex political issues in black-and-white terms. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Moral grandstanding was also linked to civic engagement.
Looks like one to read and have my lab read.
Distorting knowledge of social and expert consensus. This makes it harder to build real consensus and develop solutions.
@maddyjalbert.bsky.social you might like this if you haven’t already seen it.
in chart form
🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Here's the short version. 1/9
1/10
Jay Van Bavel, PhD
Ira Hyman
Ruo Shui
The widespread use of LLMs diminishes creative ideas.
An analysis of over 2000 college essays finds that human-written essays contributed more new ideas than GPT-4 written essays www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Parameter- or prompt-modifications does not mitigate the creativity gap.
LLMs offer new opportunities for behavioural science, but their rapid evolution poses serious challenges.
We published a reporting checklist to improve transparency, reproducibility and ethical accountability ofLLMresearch in the behavioural sciences
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.
Here is our checklist for research transparency: llm-checklist.com
It supports researchers in describing how LLMs were used, why specific methodological choices were made, and what steps were taken to ensure responsible research practices.
This was led by @StefanFeuerriegel many expert coauthors.
There is now a solid body of evidence showing that internet availability is causing a variety of outcomes that adversely affect democracy
Algorithms are major culprits becase of their focus on maximizing user engagement with little regard for the quality of content. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Social media distort our perception of norms by highlighting extereme views, can subtly blind us to the ways that most people are moderate in their views.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Social media distort our perception of norms by highlighting extereme views, can subtly blind us to the ways that most people are moderate in their views.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A reporting checklist for LLMs in behavioural science
Research by @steverathje.bsky.social et al finds people tend to prefer sycophantic AIs that reinforce prior beliefs, and increase certainty and extremity of attitudes, boost ‘better-than-average’ self-perception, and are seen as unbiased:
buff.ly/MqspZUG
HT coauthor @jayvanbavel.bsky.social
Bluesky is now the #2 social app in the US, Canada, and #3 in the UK 🦋
On bsky, ~30% of y'all are posters compared to the 1% main characters on other platforms. Turns out there's more chattiness & connection when you have algorithmic choice 🤭
