First, the Templeton Foundation has awarded Chris and the Polarization Lab $1.85 million to study methods for increasing intellectual humility on social media. The project is on a timely topic and entitled “Can Social Media Promote Intellectual Humility?” (abstract below). The grant provides a big boost to Chris’s work in the Polarization Lab and is beneficial all around.
Second, the impact of Chris’s work has not gone unnoticed—last month, the New Yorker ran a lengthy and informative profile of his recent research.
Finally, the National Science Foundation has awarded Chris a $425,000 grant to support the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS). The program will run in fifty-two locations around the world this summer (link to the program). To date, this is the largest grant received to support the program, which is quite an accomplishment in the midst of the pandemic.
“Can Social Media Promote Intellectual Humility?
Executive Summary
Addressing complex social problems, such as global pandemics, requires intellectual humility. Yet, there is growing evidence that social media—which is rapidly becoming the most common forum for public discussion about such problems—incentivizes intellectual arrogance, overconfidence, and dogma instead. This research project will examine how social media could be redesigned to help people identify their blind spots and have productive conversations with those who do not share their views. Our multidisciplinary team will: a) create a social media research platform in which design features—such as the algorithms that recommend new content to users—can be manipulated in randomized controlled trials; b) recruit more than 5,000 Americans to use this platform as part of three large field experiments in which individuals interact with automated bots to test research hypotheses evaluating the capacity for social media to foster humility in online behavior; c) develop new measures of the behavioral manifestations of intellectual humility using machine-learning methods; d) make the platform available to other researchers to cultivate a broader research agenda and community of scholars studying this topic; e) disseminate evidence-based insights from our work to key stakeholders in industry, government, and the nonprofit sector; and, f) create public-use apps that encourage the positive attitudes and behaviors associated with intellectual humility on social media. Our research agenda thus opens new lines of inquiry about how the structure of social media platforms shapes human behavior and contributes new tools and insights that can be used by scholars, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and members of the general public to promote a culture of intellectual humility.
