🔥New preprint on why political activists sometimes try to censor free speech🔥. “Speech repression and threat narratives in politics: social goals and cognitive foundations”.

RT @Ben_Tappin: Finally got round to reading this paper in detail. It’s a tour de force. If you’re interested in the potential impact of AI….

It always blows my mind how people on the left manage to (verbally) dismiss selfishness as a ubiquitous human motive. when selfishness actually drives so many of their attitudes and practical decisions. What you'd expect from a "press secretary" style social cognition, tho.

3) provide a user-friendly website for annotating your texts and running prompt optimisation (no coding required)

We 1) show that prompt choice with ChatGPT significantly affects performance at text classification tasks for social sciences,.2) present a method for *automatically* optimising prompts, and

New open access paper in the Journal of Computational Social Science, spearheaded by mathematicians Louis Abraham and @arnal_charles:. "Prompt Selection Matters: Enhancing Text Annotations for Social Sciences with Large Language Models".

+ still in alignment with the notion we can change culture and mindsets, an idea cherished by socio constructionist feminists.

Only upsides to this strategy: not bound to run counter to ordinary people's everyday experiences of parenthood and heterosexual relationships + emancipatory for many women with "female" qualities.

Instead of spending so much energy denying the existence of stable psychological diffces between men and women, progressive activists should work to make "female" qualities and jobs be perceived as more noble & socially useful. A viable 'social construction' work.

@steverathje2 @JonHaidt @AntoninAtger @chris_bail @jayvanbavel @Sacha_Altay @tboeggild @aaroe_lene @PHSBarrett @TroncheBiais could be of interest.

@steverathje2 @JonHaidt @AntoninAtger @chris_bail.could be of interest .@jayvanbavel thanks for having been our editor.

Our findings join an emerging literature showing the importance of audience effects and social motivations in social media communication (just two ex. below, cf paper for more):.

Study 3 also shows that although social motivations for sharing the news (being liked, getting a news item fat checked) are not dominant compared to perceived accuracy and fit with moral convictions, they are more at play when the political ingroup is watching:.

In both, dealing with an ingroup (vs. outgroup) audience systematically increased intentions to share news congruent to the user and her audience (i.e., it amplified partisan sharing).

Study 2-3 manipulated the perceived political slant of users on a Facebook group on which respondents imagined surfing, using vignettes.

Study 1 provides a first external validity shot. Using data on news domains shared on the US Twitter in 2019, it shows that Twitter users engage in partisan sharing only when, and all the more as, they perceive their (real) followers as being somewhat to definitely likeminded.

To show this, we used three well-powered studies run in the U.S., a study of actual news sharing behavior on Twitter (Study 1: N=1308) and two online survey experiments (Study 2: N=1735 and Study 3: N=1637).

We show that partisan social media users selectively share partisan news, whether true or false, hostile or merely slanted, based on anticipation of positive reactions from like-minded audiences, and refrain from sharing to avoid upsetting politically dissimilar audiences.

Prior research mostly highlighted internal factors—such as congruence with one’s moral identity or the perceived truth of a piece of news—as drivers of partisan sharing. They also didn't systematically analyse the influence of the perceived political slant of the audience.

Here, we demonstrate empirically that partisan sharing doesn't occur in a vacuum; it manifests all the more as people believe to be read by politically like-minded followers.