Chris Bail's Reading List

"Frenemies is just such a great contribution. It was one of the first books to really study social media and polarization in a very careful, empirical manner. This book is for readers who really want to go deep into the research design, really understand how social scientists can, for example, conduct experiments that simulate Facebook or understand how social networks shape political polarization. Jaime Settle is a really talented scholar. The rigor of the experiments and design are just wonderful in this book. I think one of the nice conclusions was to demonstrate this phenomenon of false polarization. This is the tendency for all of us to exaggerate the extremity of the other side and underestimate the extremity of our own side. It has been known since the 1990s that people do this, at least in the US. And, actually, there’s some evidence of it internationally now as well. But hers was really the first book, I think, to make such a strong connection to social media, particularly. The book was written during the surging period of Facebook’s popularity, so there weren’t many other dominant paradigms. Twitter was still relatively small. And, of course, TikTok and Instagram weren’t really around. So I think it’s fair to say it’s primarily about Facebook. Yes. I think a lot of the problem is that the people shaping the debate are not social scientists. They’re not people who have done studies of this issue. So, we have a lot of former tech employees. In the book I call them ‘apocryphal tech leaders’, people who played a central role in creating platforms, and now regret their actions. To some degree, it’s like the tobacco merchants wanting to run the oncology clinic—this idea that the people who created the problem are now uniquely qualified to fix the problem. You have people that have an engineering background, they’re extremely bright, they’ve built new technology that that no one had seen before, it’s just phenomenal. But that doesn’t mean that they have a keen understanding of human nature. Somewhat uncritically, they tend to adopt untested and highly speculative ideas about human behavior that have really been outmoded by the social science. So we see a lot of that from tech leaders on the one hand. “The internet allows us to be completely different people” On the other hand, a lot of politicians, who are also very often self-interested, want to make an easy scapegoat out of social media. For example, its role in the election of President Trump and the conservative bias in social media in the US, or, for those on the right, there’s a lot of concern about social media companies clamping down on conservatives. We have these highly seductive stories: ‘it’s just foreign misinformation campaigns,’ or ‘these companies are profiting by radicalizing us with these algorithms that they don’t fully understand,’ or ‘echo chambers are dividing us and if only the companies would break us out of our echo chambers, we’d be more moderate.’ And yet, when we start to actually do these surveys—and in the last three, four, five years, we social scientists have really started to do them—we’re seeing that for most of these common narratives are there, there just isn’t much evidence. We need a new explanation."

"The Hype Machine is just a wonderful overview of the social science research on social media. Sinan Aral is a really accomplished computational social scientist, someone who uses the tools of data science to study human behavior. He’s run some of the first and largest studies of things like fake news, or the effect of advertising on shaping human behavior. His work really isn’t about polarization, but about social media more broadly. So he’s interested in how social media shapes business and elections and health in particular. What I like about The Hype Machine is that nearly every claim in the book is supported by some type of evidence. So he’s entering this field of highly speculative debate and saying, ‘Well, here’s what we actually know. We’ve done a study and we know that when we put people on this type of social network, this happens, and when put them on that type of social network that happens.’ So he’s able to do some debunking. For example, the idea that microtargeting, firms like Cambridge Analytica, successfully paved the way for Brexit or the election of Trump. He shows that not only is there not much evidence for those claims, but there’s not much evidence that microtargeting works very well in general. So there are a lot of things in there that I think will surprise readers. He’s still worried that, fundamentally, there is going to be an inevitable conflict between the profit-seeking of large corporations and the interest of democracy. To what extent will these things inevitably collide? I think he would say that we need some kind of government regulation, to help find the sweet spot between letting free markets fix the problem and really recognizing that this is a unique challenge that we’ve never faced before. We’re in a communications environment that has been completely upended in the last 20 years. Yes. We have slightly different views on this issue. He did a study that showed that fake news travels faster than real news and that provoked a lot of concern. One issue that I have with that study is that a lot of the fake news that they tracked was fake news that had already been identified by factchecking websites. And so not only does that miss a lot—other types of fake news that might be less prominent, for example, because a piece of fake news has to rise to a certain level of prominence before it’s tracked by one of these websites—but, also, the study doesn’t effectively differentiate between people who are unknowingly spreading the information in the fake news and people who are condemning the fake news. So my overall sense is that I’m much less concerned about fake news and misinformation than he is."

"This book really nicely captures this identity-generating process that I was describing before, this tendency for human beings to present different versions of themselves, observe how other people react, and then cultivate those identities that make them feel good about themselves. Goffman was really a pioneer in thinking about identity and how identities result from interactions. Often, when people think about identity, they think about something that’s given at birth: you are a British person, or you are male, or you’re female, or you’re an upper class person, or a lower class person. But Goffman, and many others after him, discovered the fluidity of our identities, that we tend to adapt according to our social environment. The interesting question for me is, how has social media created a different environment for us to develop our identities and, also, new tools to monitor how other people think of us? In many ways, I was trying to write The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life for the 21st century with my book, Breaking the Social Media Prism. Exactly. We can present profoundly different versions of ourselves in different social settings and we’ve known this for a long time. I mean, all of us might act very differently around our closest friends than we do with our grandmother, for example. On the other hand, the internet allows us to be completely different people. When Goffman was writing this book, we were at least accountable to other people in a real-life setting. I couldn’t say that I’m a 50-year-old female because of the interactional settings Goffman developed his theory in. But, online, I absolutely could. I could be anything. There’s endless flexibility and options in presenting different versions of ourselves. It doesn’t need to be as extreme as changing one’s gender or one’s ascriptive characteristics, it could also be just a matter of emphasis—emphasize the positive, downplay the negative, and then I seem much happier than I am. We’re all familiar with this kind of profound disconnect. But we haven’t really studied and understood how the disconnect between online and offline behavior is shaping how we develop our sense of self. Exactly. The case you mentioned in the book is a man who is a single office manager who lives with his mother. He’s in his mid-40s or 50s. He’s not living a life of high status and luxury. In fact, he’s a social outcast, particular because he lives in a liberal city and he’s a conservative. What I discovered in comparing his life online and off is that social media was really providing him with a badly needed sense of belonging. Even if it was very artificial, and even if it was indeed driven by likes and new followers and those types of things, for him, these were a vital source of self-worth."

"Lilliana Mason is one of the leading political scientists studying identity. This book, Uncivil Agreement , really signaled with convincing evidence that identity is the chief division between Republicans and Democrats in the US. (It’s only about the US, unfortunately. I know some of your audience is international. Apologies for picking such parochial books, in some sense!) She really took on the idea that voters are fundamentally rational and are voting on the basis of self-interest and showed that we will go to extreme lengths to protect our identities and attack the identities of others, even if those identities are pretty meaningless. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She draws upon classic social psychology from the 1960s and 1970s to show that even the seemingly most meaningless identities, we can suddenly start to defend if they are threatened. Then she asked the question, ‘Well, if we have this tendency to blindly defend our identities and attack those of others, then what would a political party do, armed with the full resources of media campaigns and micro targeting, or other types of extensive campaign tools, with these same, human tendencies?’ And her answer is that identity has come to subsume all of the other things that used to predict our political position. It used to be that our education or class or gender would be predictive of what we think about an issue. Now, more and more, it’s simply our identity. I agree. It is tempting, when one makes identity central, to think of these things as almost intrinsic. You are born a conservative or you were born a liberal. What’s interesting is the way that issues become stitched together into a narrative. Why should we, a priori, assume that one’s attitudes about sexual orientation should be linked to one’s attitudes about the military? And yet, when you look at the ways that these things become tied together, Lilliana Mason would argue, I think, that it’s political parties that strategically draw boundaries around issues that they know will coalesce support. The story that she tells is about how political parties change and stretch the identity of the political party to encompass larger groups of people. And then, over time, these things seem almost natural—but, really, they are the effect of political strategy. It’s true. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? That’s an important point, because you were asking about optimism earlier. One point of optimism that many people will have—both in the US and Britain, I think it’s fair to say—is that we don’t really care for our options. In the US, for example, if you ask people classic survey questions like, ‘How concerned would you be if your son or daughter married a member of the other party?’ When we look at those trends over the last 40 years, it’s disturbing because huge numbers of people are now saying that they’re really worried about this. But, in a clever experiment, some political scientist instead asked, ‘Would you rather have a son/daughter-in-law who talks about politics a lot, or one who is from the other party?’ And time and again, people just don’t want the in-law who talks about politics. It does suggest that a lot of our animosity towards the other side is simply driven by our distaste for politics in general, at least in the US. Yes, and one of the things that we’re observing is that the opportunities for offline contact between Republicans and Democrats in the US is really shrinking. A recent study showed that there’s now such residential segregation (by political party), that there are shockingly few opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to interact with each other, apart from in these online settings. And, certainly, the Covid pandemic has exacerbated that problem."

"Yes, but I would actually put this book first if I had to order the books in terms of importance. The reason is that this book is really ushering in a golden age of social science. When you think about it, 20 years ago, if I wanted to do a study—like I did in my book—I would need to go out and talk to lots of people about their political views. Maybe I could talk to a couple of 100 people, but that would be it. In the last 10 years what’s happened is the data revolution. We have unprecedented amounts of data and we can now study millions of people in seconds. For a social scientist, it’s like we finally found our telescope, to quote Duncan Watts, one of the great computational social scientists. “The opportunities for offline contact between Republicans and Democrats in the US is really shrinking” So Matt Salganik, in this really forward-thinking book, began to ask the question: how can this new data help us study new places? The examples he raises are everything from studying poverty in places where it’s difficult to do surveys, to studying authoritarianism. It’s all sorts of things that have been beyond the pale of social science. And yet, I also love how Matt is very careful to understand the limits of the field—the ethical dilemmas that can arise, the distortions that can happen when we only focus on the online digital traces and ignore what happens offline. That’s why it was such a great inspiration for my own book. I am an optimist. A good friend describes me as ‘a dystopian idealist,’ which I think is probably the most apt description of my outlook. We need to become aware of the tendency of social media to distort our identities and that goes for both our understanding of other people and of ourselves. This thing I call ‘the social media prism’ amplifies status-seeking extremists and mutes moderates, leaving us all feeling more polarized than we really are. And it often leads many people to engage in behavior that may make them feel good about themselves, or give them a sense of status, but it’s ultimately very deleterious for democracy. And so what we need to do is become more introspective when we use social media. We need a new kind of civics training. And that involves, in the first step, simply, becoming more aware of how social media distorts our understanding of ourselves and each other."