Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experiment.
dc.contributor.author | Mosleh, M | |
dc.contributor.author | Martel, C | |
dc.contributor.author | Eckles, D | |
dc.contributor.author | Rand, DG | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-03-01T08:38:08Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2021-02-09 | |
dc.description.abstract | Americans are much more likely to be socially connected to copartisans, both in daily life and on social media. However, this observation does not necessarily mean that shared partisanship per se drives social tie formation, because partisanship is confounded with many other factors. Here, we test the causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in a field experiment on Twitter. We created bot accounts that self-identified as people who favored the Democratic or Republican party and that varied in the strength of that identification. We then randomly assigned 842 Twitter users to be followed by one of our accounts. Users were roughly three times more likely to reciprocally follow-back bots whose partisanship matched their own, and this was true regardless of the bot's strength of identification. Interestingly, there was no partisan asymmetry in this preferential follow-back behavior: Democrats and Republicans alike were much more likely to reciprocate follows from copartisans. These results demonstrate a strong causal effect of shared partisanship on the formation of social ties in an ecologically valid field setting and have important implications for political psychology, social media, and the politically polarized state of the American public. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | William and Flora Hewlett Foundation | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | Reset project of Luminate | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | National Science Foundation (NSF) | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 118 (7), article. e2022761118 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1073/pnas.2022761118 | |
dc.identifier.grantnumber | Graduate Research Fellowship Grant 174530 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/124952 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | National Academy of Sciences | en_GB |
dc.rights | Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND). | en_GB |
dc.subject | echo chambers | en_GB |
dc.subject | intergroup relations | en_GB |
dc.subject | partisanship | en_GB |
dc.subject | social media | en_GB |
dc.title | Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experiment. | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2021-03-01T08:38:08Z | |
dc.identifier.issn | 0027-8424 | |
exeter.place-of-publication | United States | en_GB |
dc.description | This is the final published version, available from the National Academy of Sciences via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.description | Data Availability: All data and scripts necessary to reproduce the results are available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/s5e6j/. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | en_GB |
dc.identifier.pmid | 33563758 | |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | en_GB |
dcterms.dateAccepted | 2020-12-01 | |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2021-02-09 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2021-03-01T08:33:37Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | VoR | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2021-03-01T08:38:11Z | |
refterms.panel | C | en_GB |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).