Retaining students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is critical as demand for STEM graduates increases. Whereas many approaches to improve persistence target individuals’ internal beliefs, skills, and traits, the intervention in this experiment strengthened students’ peer social networks to help them persevere. Students in a gateway biology course were randomly assigned to complete a control or values affirmation exercise, a psychological intervention hypothesized to have positive social effects. By the end of the term, affirmed students had an estimated 29% more friends in the course on average than controls. Affirmation also prompted structural changes in students’ network positions such that affirmed students were more central in the overall course friendship network. These differing social trajectories predicted STEM persistence: Affirmed students were 11.7 percentage points more likely than controls to take the next course in the bioscience sequence, an effect that was statistically mediated by students’ end-of-semester friendships.

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Public reactions to protests are often divided, with some viewing the protest as a legitimate response to injustice and others perceiving the protest as illegitimate. We examine how online news sources oriented to different audiences frame protest, potentially encouraging these divergent reactions. We focus on online news coverage following the 2014 police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown. Preregistered analyses of headlines and images and their captions showed that sources oriented toward African Americans were more likely to include content conveying racial injustice and legitimacy of the subsequent protests than sources oriented toward a general audience. In contrast, general audience sources emphasized conflict between protesters and police, making fewer references to the protesters’ cause. Whereas much work on media segregation addresses the propensity of audiences to consume different sources, our work suggests that news sources may also contribute to information fragmentation by differentially framing the same events.

Selective exposure to one-sided news coverage, especially of controversial geopolitical events, may contribute to growing social polarization. Existing research on "echo chambers"-fragmented information environments that amplify homogeneous perspectives-focuses on the degree to which individuals and social media platforms shape informational segregation. Here, we explore whether news organizations directly contribute to echo chambers through the hyperlinks they embed in online articles. Using network and text analysis, we examined coverage of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and found that online news media exhibited weak community structure and high connectivity across news outlets. However, analyses also indicated that media sources were more likely to link to coverage that was similar to their own in terms of emotional valence and stereotype-relevant aspects of the events. While hyperlinking to diverse news sources may ameliorate fragmented information environments, selectively linking to similar coverage may contribute to growing polarization.