social psychology

The following is an edited transcript of a brief talk I gave as part of the ANU School of Sociology Pandemic Society Panel Series on May 25, 2020.  

 The rapid shift online due to physical distancing measures has resulted in significant changes to the way we work and interact. One highly salient change is the use of Zoom and other video conferencing programs to facilitate face-to-face communications that would have otherwise taken place in a shared physical venue.

A surprising side effect that’s emerging from this move online has been the seemingly ubiquitous, or at least widespread, experience of physical exhaustion. Many of us know this exhaustion first-hand and more than likely, have commiserated with friends and colleagues who are struggling with the same. This “Zoom fatigue,” as it’s been called, presents something of a puzzle.

Interacting via video should ostensibly require lower energy outputs than an in-person engagement. Take teaching as an example. Teaching a class online means sitting or standing in front of a computer, in the same spot, in your own home. In contrast, teaching in a physical classroom means getting yourself to campus, traipsing up and down stairs, pacing around a lecture hall, and racing to get coffee in the moments between class ending and an appointment that begins 2 minutes sooner than the amount of time it takes you to get back to your office. The latter should be more tiring. The former, apparently, is. What’s going on here? Why are we so tired? more...

 Today I worked on three separate collaborations: feedback on a thesis draft, a paper revision with colleagues at other universities, and a grant proposal with mostly senior scholars. Each collaboration represents my integration with distinct project teams, on which my status varies. And along with my relative status, so too varies my relationship with the Track Changes editing tool.

When giving feedback on my student’s thesis, I wrote over existing text with reckless abandon. I also left comments, moved paragraphs, and deleted at will. When working on my paper collaboration, I also edited freely, though was more likely to include comments justifying major alterations. When working on the research grant, for a project team on which I am the most junior member, I knew not to change any of the text directly. Instead, I made suggestions using the Comment function, sometimes with alternative text, always phrased and punctuated as a question. more...

Horse-race style political opinion polling is an integral a part of western democratic elections, with a history dating back to the 1800’s. Political opinion polling originally took hold in the first quarter of the 19^th century, when a Pennsylvania straw poll predicted Andrew Jackson’s victory over John Quincey Adams in the bid for President of the United States. The weekly magazine Literary Digest then began conducting national opinion polls in the early 1900s, followed finally by the representative sampling introduced the George Gallup in 1936. Gallup’s polling method is the foundation of political opinion polls to this day (even though the Gallup poll itself recently retired from presidential election predictions).

While polling has been around a long time, new technological developments let pollsters gather data more frequently, analyze and broadcast it more quickly, and project the data to wider audiences. Through these developments, polling data have moved to the center of election coverage. Major news outlets report on the polls as a compulsory part of political segments, candidates cite poll numbers in their speeches and interviews, and tickers scroll poll numbers across both social media feeds and the bottom of television screens. So central has polling become that in-the-moment polling data superimpose candidates as they participate in televised debates, creating media events in which performance and analysis converge in real time. So integral has polling become to the election process that it may be difficult to imagine what coverage would look in the absence of these widely projected metrics. more...

I know this is a technology blog but today, let’s talk about science.

When I’m not theorizing digital media and technology, I moonlight as an experimental social psychologist. The Reproducibility Project, which ultimately finds that results from most psychological studies cannot be reproduced, has therefore weighed heavy on my mind (and prominent in over-excited conversations with my partner/at our dogs).

The Reproducibility Project is impressive in its size and scope. In collaboration with the authors of original studies and volunteer researchers numbering in the hundreds, project managers at the Open Science Framework replicated 100 psychological experiments from three prominent psychology journals. Employing “direct replications” in which protocols were recreated as closely as possible, the Reproducibility Project found that out of 100 studies, only 39 produced the same results. That means over 60% of published studies did not have their findings confirmed. more...

Social theory should both grow out of, and be applicable to, empirical phenomena. As such, an important part of theorizing is to understand the substantive realities about that which we theorize. When theorizing about new technologies, this means keeping up with a highly complex and quickly changing empirical landscape. This post is a roundup of some recent empirical findings about social media trends, with a focus on Facebook—the current social media “hub.”

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