Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM for 13h 46m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.
Ian Anderson
Is social media designed to reward people for acting badly?
The answer is clearly yes, given that the reward structure on social media platforms relies on popularity, as indicated by the number of responses — likes and comments — a post receives from other users. Black-box algorithms then further amplify the spread of posts that have attracted attention.
Sharing widely read content, by itself, isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem when attention-getting, controversial content is prioritized by design. Given the design of social media sites, users form habits to automatically share the most engaging information regardless of its accuracy and potential harm. Offensive statements, attacks on out groups and false news are amplified, and misinformation often spreads further and faster than the truth.
We are two social psychologists and a marketing scholar. Our research, presented at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit, shows that social media actually has the ability to create user habits to share high-quality content. After a few tweaks to the reward structure of social media platforms, users begin to share information that is accurate and fact-based.
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To investigate the effect of a new reward structure, we gave financial rewards to some users for sharing accurate content and not sharing misinformation. These financial rewards simulated the positive social feedback, such as likes, that users typically receive when they share content on platforms. In essence, we created a new reward structure based on accuracy instead of attention.
As on popular social media platforms, participants in our research learned what got rewarded by sharing information and observing the outcome, without being explicitly informed of the rewards beforehand. This means that the intervention did not change the users’ goals, just their online experiences. After the change in reward structure, participants shared significantly more content that was accurate. More remarkably, users continued to share accurate content even after we removed rewards for accuracy in a subsequent round of testing. These results show that users can be given incentives to share accurate information as a matter of habit.
A different group of users received rewards for sharing misinformation and for not sharing accurate content. Surprisingly, their sharing most resembled that of users who shared news as they normally would, without any financial reward. The striking similarity between these groups reveals that social media platforms encourage users to share attention-getting content that engages others at the expense of accuracy and safety.
Possible, after all.
Dolphin animatronic fooled real animals: