William Brady: MADness: Understanding and Counteracting Social Discord and Moral Contagion

William Brady deploys behavioral experiments, big data analytics, and natural language processing to elucidate how human psychology interacts with social media technology to affect morality, emotions, and decision-making. Until very recently in their evolution any one human interacted with no more than a few dozen others during their lifetime. Moreover, those interactions were face-to-face. By its very nature social media is often subjecting our brains to situations for which they are not evolved to deal with properly. Politicians, large corporations, and 'influencers' with agendas are taking advantage of several features of social media to benefit themselves and their in-group (political party, religion, ethnicity, and more) at the expense of large swaths of society. Content intended to trigger outrage is a particularly prominent tool in their social media toolbox. In this episode Dr. Brady talks about his research on the spread of moralized content (moral contagion) on social media and how it muffles critical thinking and thoughtful conversations and cooperation amongst individuals with different perspectives on issues. This is big problem for which solutions are not easy given that algorithms are purposely designed in ways that amplify moralized content because this increases the profits and power of those who peddle the outrage, fear, and outgroup hostility and schadenfreude.LINKS

Brady lab page: https://williamjbrady.com/

Relevant published articles:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=brady+wj+social+media&sort=date&size=200