Research

Teachers spend their time educating young people, imparting both intellectual knowledge and practical life skills, in an attempt to help children grow into adults. They often do this for low pay and little thanks. They are the best of us, or at least they’re supposed to be.

But teachers are regular people, too. And regular people have biases that sometimes inhibit their abilities to do their jobs.

A forthcoming study — authored by Annenberg School for Communication alumni Elena Maris (Ph.D. ’18) and Timothy Libert (Ph.D. ’17) and doctoral candidate Jennifer R. Henrichsen — analyzed over 22,000 pornography websites and found that 93% of them were sending user data to at least one third party.

Five Annenberg faculty members and graduate students will present at the 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science, to be held July 17-20 in The Netherlands.

The presentations are listed below. All events will be held at the University of Amsterdam. For the full program, visit the IC²S² conference website.

Thursday, July 18

4:45-5:00

Cognition (C0.02 / 2D)

The Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center is pleased to release its newest report, entitled "The Platform Economy and the Future of the City." In addition to including a summary of the MIC Center's recent conference of the same name, the report makes recommendations for how Philadelphia can maximize the benefits of the platform economy for all.

Eleven Annenberg faculty members and graduate students will present at the International Association for Media and Communication Research’s 2019 Conference, to be held July 7-11 in Madrid, Spain.

The presentations are listed below. All events will be held at the Complutense University of Madrid. For the full program, visit IAMCR’s conference website.

Monday, July 8

8:30-10:00

Algorithms and Privacy

The International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the Urban Communication Foundation (UCF) announced earlier this week that Doctoral Student Arlene Fernández is the winner of the 2019 Urban Communication Research Grant. The prize will be officially awarded during the upcoming IAMCR conference, held July 7-11, 2019 in Madrid.

How do social media companies decide what is and isn’t allowed on their platforms? And, once they’ve established standards, how to do they go about enforcing them? These questions are at the forefront of the global conversation about technology, and the solutions require balance between protecting free speech and limiting online harassment.

Founded in 1903, the California Nurses Association (CNA) is one of the most powerful nursing unions in the country. CNA has more than 100,000 members who work in over 200 facilities. Many of these members connect their profession and their union work with social justice and have self-described socialist and/or activist leanings. Why then do the members, who are largely women, seem hesitant to connect themselves with feminism?

Ever wonder how some people seem to meet their fitness goals with ease and love eating healthy foods while other folks constantly struggle to do either? According to a new study from the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School, people with stronger life purpose are more likely to accept messages promoting health behavior change than those with weaker sense of purpose. And this might be because they experience less decisional conflict while considering health advice.

A new study, published in PNAS, shows that collective intelligence — peer learning within social networks — can increase belief accuracy even in politically homogenous groups.