Collective Psychology of Social Media: Emotions, Conflict, and Mental Health in the Digital Age

Speaker: Kristina Lerman, Senior Principal Scientist at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute

Social media has linked people on a global scale, rapidly transforming how we communicate and share  ideas and feelings. This massive interconnectedness created vulnerabilities in the form of societal division, growing mistrust and deteriorating mental health. My group has developed computational tools to detect emotions in online discussions, providing new insights into the collective psychology of social media. My talk focuses on three case studies: affective polarization, intergroup conflict and psychological contagion. Affective polarization refers to the emotional divide in political polarization, where different groups not only disagree but also dislike and distrust each other.  I show that “in-group love, out-group hate” that characterize affective polarization also exist in online interactions. I introduce a model of belief change in affectively polarized systems and show that it explains how out-group hate amplifies groupthink, and why exposure to out-group beliefs, long thought to be the solution to reducing polarization, often backfires. Next, I analyze the language of “othering” and show how fear speech and hate speech work in tandem to fuel intergroup conflict and propaganda campaigns. Turning to mental health, I show that online pro-anorexia communities grow through mechanisms similar to online radicalization. Using generative AI we explore the collective mindsets of online communities to identify unhealthy cognitions that would be missed by traditional moderation. This research provides new insights into the complex social and emotional dynamics of political discourse and mental health in the digital age.

About the speaker:

Kristina Lerman is a Senior Principal Scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and a Research Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. With a background in physics, her research now focuses on applying network analysis and machine learning to computational social science, including the dynamics of social media and crowdsourcing. Her work has been featured in prominent outlets such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and MIT Tech Review. She is a fellow of the AAAI.

Monday 4th November 2024, 4 PM UK Time
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Meeting ID: 912 6542 5073
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