Browsing by Author "Bail, Christopher A"

In an age witnessing the coinciding of increasing connectedness facilitated by the advent of the internet and social media and growing mobility due to technological efficiency gains and rising economic prosperity, optimistic observers might expect to find accompanying increases in societal harmony and mutual understanding among social groups. In contrast to such an optimistic vision, contemporary societies are experiencing expanding polarization between political and societal groups and a widening appeal of exclusionary ideas that had marked more contentious times. The scholarly literature has developed a number of economic and individual psychological explanations for this divergence of the idealized and observed path of contemporary societies, but at root the phenomenon derives from collective identities of “us” and “them” which are based on perceptions of in- and outgroups. Such perceptions are subject to well-studied biases that tend to elevate the ingroup and debase the outgroup.

While such biased perceptions and their connection to intergroup relations are well understood in relation to racial minority-majority relations, this is not the case for the increasingly important relations between native- and foreign-born populations. Similarly, for relations among political subgroups in a given society such misperceptions have been well documented, but it the most efficacious strategy to tackle such misperceptions remains an open debate. Specifically, scholars debate in how far misperceptions that fulfill social-psychological functions of affirming individuals’ group memberships can be overcome with corrective information or whether such attempts lead individuals to retreat into their groups’ corner. With prior evidence for both predictions, the literature lacks a clear understanding of the scope conditions occasioning either reaction. The studies in this dissertation set out to address these gaps providing evidence from representative cross-national surveys and experimental work at the intersection of perceptions, immigration, and intergroup relations.

Chapter 2 investigates the role of misperceptions in shaping the relations between the native- and foreign-born population, asking first whether such misperceptions extend beyond innumeracy and how such misperceptions affect the native-born populations attitudes toward immigration. Descriptive analyses of the native-born population of ten European countries reveal widespread misperceptions about migrants’ motives. In multilevel models, these misperceptions predict threat perceptions and concern about immigration as well as anti-immigration policy preferences and voting behavior. Chapter 3 departs from the existence of group-based misperceptions and examines the conditions under which such misperceptions are amenable to corrective information or conversely liable to deteriorate when challenged by such information. In an online experiment designed to approximate real world exposure to counter-attitudinal information, I manipulate the level of perceived choice in exposure and engagement with such information participants have. Results are suggestive for the role of choice in moderating the effect of corrective information on misperceptions and support the theorized mechanism of counter-arguing for backfire effects, in that extreme conservatives prompted to reflect on counter-attitudinal information more strongly endorse misperceptions.

In sum, this dissertation provides evidence that misperceptions about outgroups extend to the perceptions of immigrants where they are associated with broader anti- immigration attitudes and behavior. Such immigration related misperceptions are generally amenable to corrective information except for those individuals who strongly identify with a group whose status depends on the misperception, in which case attempts to correct the misperceptions carry the risk of backfiring.

The advent of the internet and social media has spurred an explosion in the number and variety of claims to authoritative knowledge in scientific and political spheres, following a period of unprecedented consolidation of this authority in the institutions of academic science and mainstream political journalism respectively during the twentieth century. This trend has been characterized by stark partisanship, primarily in the sense that conservative movements have sought to increase their influence, guided by the perception that these institutions are dominated by liberal interests. The result has been an information eco-system that is a chaotic, balkanized, and anathema to broadly shared understandings of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. These processes have been well-researched and theorized but major gaps have yet to be addressed including a) how well political partisans are navigating a more diverse and conflicted eco-system, b) what the nefarious social-psychological effects are of this kind of conflict in knowledge authorities, and c) what predicts vulnerability to these effects. In the following studies, I leverage a range of methods including analysis of representative surveys, experiments, and analysis of observational social media data to explore these questions.

Chapter 2 examines these processes in the context of conservative understandings of science, building on studies that have documented steep declines in trust in scientists among conservatives, and attempts to reconcile this finding with stable attitudes toward scientific research itself. Findings from analysis of the General Social Survey suggest that stable conservatives, or those that do not switch to and from a conservative identity at some point, are most skeptical of scientists and most positive toward scientific research as a benefit to society. This suggests conservative identity is orienting for conservatives, allowing them to maintain participation in the scientific field while criticizing an institution they perceive as biased. Chapter 3 examines another area where partisan asymmetries have been observed in the context of knowledge and trust: political disinformation. Previous studies have established that exposure to and sharing of political disinformation (often called “fakes news”) on social media occurs almost exclusively among political conservatives as opposed to liberals. But no study to date has examined how a more diverse and conflicted news environment might be contributing to partisan asymmetries in susceptibility to disinformation. I conduct an experiment to test the effect of exposure to conflicting information on susceptibility to political disinformation. Results suggest that being exposed to conflicting information makes self-identifying “strong liberals” more susceptible to disinformation, but this effect is not observed among any other group. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine this relationship in the “real world” using the American National Election Study and observational data from Twitter. Findings from these analyses suggest that a) ideologically heterogenous media diets are associated with belief in partisan conspiracy theories among strong partisans and heavy news consumers and b) that those engaging with disinformation on social media consume more political media generally and have more ideologically heterogenous diets. Taken together, these studies highlight the potentially negative large-scale effects that a diverse and polarized knowledge environment can have on individuals’ understandings of scientific and political issues and complicate the emerging common wisdom that exposure to different perspectives alone can help alleviate political polarization and susceptibility to disinformation.

How does gender inequality persist in the art world today? Or, more generally, what role do social characteristics like gender play in markets for cultural goods, such as art? That is the focus of this research. Using a novel dataset of 255,887 contemporary artworks produced by 18,624 artists and gleaned from an online marketplace, I employ the case of gender in the art world to investigate how social characteristics of producers can impact market outcomes and structures. Although there is prominent scholarship on product markets and inequality within sociology, questions such as these are rarely posed. Work generally focuses on the quality of goods and on the status of producing organizations, without attention to individual producer characteristics, including gender.The first study of this dissertation implements machine learning classification to examine whether female and male artists produce artworks with different characteristics. These analyses rely on a taxonomy of over 1,000 art-relevant features, coded by a team of art historians, to describe the disciplines, physical attributes, styles and periods, object types, and settings of each artwork in the dataset. I find that artworks by women and men do not substantively differ on the majority of aesthetic, conceptual, or material features that they depict. While some, less common, features of art appear more in work by women or men, by in large these two groups of producers do not bring different products to the art market. Studies two and three of this dissertation move to address alternative hypotheses for disparity in the economic outcomes of women and men in the contemporary art market. With mixed effect regression, I test whether artworks by women are priced differently than artworks by men, even after accounting for the categories and features they depict. I find that art by women is listed at a discount of approximately 10 to 12 percent relative to art by men. I also find that, of those art qualities that differ in use between women and men, qualities of art predominantly made by women are valued less than those predominantly made by men, net of who creates them. In combination, these findings echo and extend calls to value the labor of women and men comparably. They also broaden our understanding of the potential for social status characteristics, like gender, to act as organizing structures in the production, meaning, and valuation of markets.

The emergence and persistence of communities has long been of interest to social scientists, and the increasingly digital landscape in which these communities exist present some important theoretical and methodological challenges and opportunities. In this dissertation, I develop methods for identifying and characterizing communities on Twitter and examine the kinds of interactions that affect social cohesion. Using the Fat Liberation community as a case study, I find that there is a core set of users engaged in conversations around criticizing conceptions of Fatness, and I observe partitions in the community differentiated by stylistic approaches to discussion rather than topical focus. I next operationalize hypotheses from Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chain theory using novel methods for measuring the effects of engaging in particular types of interactions. I find support for several hypotheses generated directly from this theory in online settings and further find that high-status users play a particularly important role in producing group cohesion - a perhaps underplayed aspect of the theory that may be particularly important in online settings. Finally, I build on conflict theories to hypothesize that exposure to toxic interactions will affect social cohesion - particularly when they involve other high-status users. I do not find support for these hypotheses, however, suggesting further work should investigate the role of toxic behavior by accounting for the situational dynamics produced by interactions.