Research

By Erica Brockmeier, Penn Today

Dis- and mis-information is rampant online, and bots catch a lot of the blame. But a new study from Professor Sandra González-Bailón found that verified media accounts are more central in the spread of information on Twitter than bots.

Penn researcher Jessica Fishman has always been fascinated by what sways decision-making.

Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants’ curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, such as asking questions, playing trivia games, and gossiping. However, such methods focus on quantifying a person’s curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed.

Imagine you gave the exact same art pieces to two different groups of people and asked them to curate an art show. The art is radical and new. The groups never speak with one another, and they organize and plan all the installations independently. On opening night, imagine your surprise when the two art shows are nearly identical. How did these groups categorize and organize all the art the same way when they never spoke with one another?

When compared to non-humorous news clips, viewers are not only more likely to share humorously-presented news, but they are also more likely to remember the content from these segments.

Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab founder Emile Bruneau devoted his career to using the tools of neuroscience to bring peace to groups of people in conflict around the world. When he received a brain cancer diagnosis in the final days of 2018, his reaction was not to grieve for himself and his family, but to accelerate his research and maximize his positive effect on the world in the time that remained. He did this with an incandescent positivity familiar to all who knew him.

When searching for news online, most people probably assume they are receiving the best results. But what if the search engine is prioritizing certain types of content over others, even when it isn’t the best source for the information you’re looking for?

The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication is proud to present CARGC Paper 14, “Hectic Slowness: Precarious Temporalities of Care in Vietnam’s Digital Mamasphere,” by Giang Nguyen-Thu. Crafted during Nguyen-Thu’s CARGC Postdoctoral Fellowship and originally presented as a CARGC Colloquium, CARGC Paper 14 explores the temporal entanglements of care and precarity in Vietnam by unpacking the condition of “hectic slowness” experienced by mothers who sell food on Facebook against the widespread fear of dietary intoxication.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom about segregated news bubbles, mobile devices are exposing Americans to a much greater variety of news, diversifying the stories that people encounter and exposing them to a breadth of information sources.