Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect*

Denter, Philipp; Dumav, Martin; Ginzburg, Boris

doi:10.1093/ej/ueaa128

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, misestimation of correlation patterns in mortgage defaults is thought to have played a role in triggering the global financial crisis of 2008 (Salmon, 2009). Neglecting correlations can contribute to false beliefs and ideological extremeness in social and political settings (Denter et al, 2021; Glaeser and Sunstein, 2009; Levy et al, 2022; Ortoleva and Snowberg, 2015). Likewise, correlations in the physical environment should, in principle, be leveraged to support perception (Geisler, 2008; Parise, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative evidence weighting and accumulation in correlated environments

Tardiff,

Kang,

Gold

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The brain forms certain deliberative decisions following normative principles related to how sensory observations are weighed and accumulated over time. Previously we showed that these principles can account for how people adapt their decisions to the temporal dynamics of the observations (Glaze et al., 2015). Here we show that this adaptability extends to accounting for correlations in the observations, which can have a dramatic impact on the weight of evidence provided by those observations. We tested online human participants on a novel visual-discrimination task with pairwise-correlated observations. With minimal training, the participants adapted to uncued, trial-by-trial changes in the correlations and produced decisions based on an approximately normative weighting and accumulation of evidence. The results highlight the robustness of our brain’s ability to process sensory observations with respect to not just their physical features but also the weight of evidence they provide for a given decision.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normative evidence weighting and accumulation in correlated environments

Tardiff,

Kang,

Gold

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This underlies the main results of the paper, including the strictly positive margin of success, and the ability of a hopeless petition to reach the required quota of signatures. More broadly, the paper adds to the literature studying the role of online platforms in shaping political behaviour (see Pogorelskiy and Shum, 2019; Enikolopov et al, 2020; Denter et al, 2021; Denter and Ginzburg, 2022 for recent work on this topic).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slacktivism

Ginzburg

2023

Journal of Theoretical Politics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many countries have introduced e-government petitioning systems, in which a petition that gathers a certain quota of signatures triggers some political outcome. This paper models citizens who choose whether to sign such a petition. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the petition’s chance of bringing change. The number of citizens is large, while the cost of signing is positive but low. I show that a petition that can bring change succeeds by a strictly positive margin. Hence, a citizen signing the petition is almost surely not pivotal. On the other hand, a petition that cannot bring change still gathers the required number of signatures when citizens are not very well informed, implying a failure of information aggregation.

show abstract

“…Our results show that political campaigns have different effects on different voting groups. In par- 2 De Marzo et al (2003), Golub and Jackson (2012), Gagnon-Bartsch and Rabin (2015) and Denter et al (2019) study how correlation neglect affects the diffusion of information in social networks. Glaeser and Sunstein (2009) and Levy and Razin (2015a; explore the implications for group decision making in political applications.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarized Extremes and the Confused Centre: Campaign Targeting of Voters with Correlation Neglect

Levy

Barreda

Razin

2021

QJPS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We model the effect of competing political campaigns on the opinion of voters who exhibit correlation neglect, i.e., fail to understand that different campaigns might be correlated. We show that political campaigners can manipulate voters' beliefs even when voters understand the informativeness of each campaign separately. The optimal coordination of campaigns involves negative correlation of good news and sometimes full positive correlation of bad news. We show that competition in targeted campaigns has the effect of changing the opinions of different groups in different ways; competition increases polarisation among extreme voters but at the same time increases the variance and the quality of moderates' voting decisions.

show abstract

Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect*

Cited by 11 publications

References 35 publications

Normative evidence weighting and accumulation in correlated environments

Normative evidence weighting and accumulation in correlated environments

Slacktivism

Polarized Extremes and the Confused Centre: Campaign Targeting of Voters with Correlation Neglect

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About