Christopher Bail

Duke University | DU

Social media are frequently blamed for exacerbating ideological divides. We evaluate whetherit is possible to design a social media platform that instead promotes productive, open-mindeddialogue among users. We recruited 1,043 Americans who expressed willingness to test a newsocial media platform by installing a mobile app we developed for iOS and...

Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based model...

Research on the impacts of online political discussions have focused on social media "echo chambers," but less is known about how people respond to online environments dominated by those who are politically dissimilar. We conduct a preregistered experiment using a mobile application we developed to evaluate how being outnumbered by out-partisans im...

Political discourse is the soul of democracy, but misunderstanding and conflict can fester in divisive conversations. The widespread shift to online discourse exacerbates many of these problems and corrodes the capacity of diverse societies to cooperate in solving social problems. Scholars and civil society groups promote interventions that make co...

Women have less influence than men in a variety of settings. Does this result from stereotypes that depict women as less capable, or biased interpretations of gender differences in behavior? We present a field experiment that—unbeknownst to the participants—randomized the gender of avatars assigned to Democrats using a social media platform we crea...

Do anonymous online conversations between people with different political views exacerbate or mitigate partisan polarization? We created a mobile chat platform to study the impact of such discussions. Our study recruited Republicans and Democrats in the United States to complete a survey about their political views. We later randomized them into tr...

A longstanding theory indicates that the threat of a common enemy can mitigate conflict between members of rival groups. We tested this hypothesis in a pre-registered experiment where 1670 Republicans and Democrats in the United States were asked to complete an online social learning task with a bot that was labeled as a member of the opposing part...

Women have less influence than men in a variety of settings for at least two reasons. First, pervasive gender stereotypes that depict women as less authoritative often cause women to be treated differently by others. Second, research indicates many women use language, tones, or mannerisms that undermine their authority. But it is not yet known how...

There is widespread concern that social media is driving political polarization. However, there is also increasing evidence that conversation between people with opposing political views— which social media can enable—may decrease animus between them. Do anonymous online conversations between people of different parties exacerbate or mitigate parti...

Analysis of short text, such as social media posts, is extremely difficult because it relies on observing many document-level word co-occurrence pairs. Beyond topic distributions, a common downstream task of the modeling is grouping the authors of these documents for subsequent analyses. Traditional models estimate the document groupings and identi...

Longstanding theory indicates the threat of a common enemy can mitigate conflict between members of rival groups. We tested this hypothesis in a pre-registered experiment where 1,670 Republicans and Democrats in the United States were asked to complete a collaborative online task with an automated agent or “bot” that was labelled as a member of the...

The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution...

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this ques...

A large literature examines the global diffusion of institutions and policies, yet there is much less systematic research on how cultural tastes, consumption preferences, and other individual interests spread across the globe. With a data set that tracks the most popular Google search terms in 199 countries between 2004 and 2014, and drawing on Gab...

Significance Social media sites are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that prevent people from being exposed to information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. We conducted a field experiment that offered a large group of Democrats and Republicans financial compensation to follow bots that retw...

Recent terrorist attacks by first- and second-generation immigrants in the United States and Europe indicate that radicalization may result from the failure of ethnic integration—or the rise of intergroup prejudice in communities where “home-grown” extremists are raised. Yet, these community-level drivers are notoriously difficult to study because...

There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating "echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly...

Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These “cogni...

Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These “cogni...

The metaphor of resonance often describes the fit between a message and an audience’s worldviews. Yet scholars have largely ignored the cognitive processes audiences use to interpret messages and interactions that determine why certain messages and other cultural objects appeal to some but not others. Drawing on pragmatism, we argue that resonance...

Significance Social media provide potent opportunities for advocacy organizations to shape public debates because of the rapidly increasing number of people who frequent such forums each day. However, social scientists have not yet explained why some advocacy organizations create large-scale public debate whereas most others do not. Using automated...

Objective: To determine whether exchanges of emotional language between health advocacy organizations and social media users predict the spread of posts about autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Methods: I created a Facebook application that tracked views of ASD advocacy organizations' posts between July 19, 2011, and December 18, 2012. I evaluate...

Social media sites such as Facebook have become a powerful tool for public health outreach because they enable advocacy organizations to influence the rapidly increasing number of people who frequent these forums. Yet the very open-ness of social media sites creates fierce competition for public attention. The vast majority of social media messages...

Sudden, broad-scale shifts in public opinion about social problems are relatively rare. Until recently, social scientists were forced to conduct post-hoc case studies of such unusual events that ignore the broader universe of possible shifts in public opinion that do not materialize. The vast amount of data that has recently become available via so...

While secrecy enables policy makers to escape public scrutiny, leaks of classified information reveal the social construction of reality by the state. I develop a theory that explains how leaks shape the discursive frames states create to communicate the causes of social problems to the public and corresponding solutions to redress them. Synthesizi...

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior—or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media surve...

The rise of the Internet, social media, and digitized historical archives has produced a colossal amount of text-based data in recent years. While computer scientists have produced powerful new tools for automated analyses of such "big data," they lack the theoretical direction necessary to extract meaning from them. Meanwhile, cultural sociologist...

In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people...

Social media websites have inspired considerable attention from social scientists in recent years because they offer the potential to collect an unprecedented amount of data about social relationships in situ. Though millions of lines of texts can be mined from such sites in seconds, these data lack critical information about the broader social con...

Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations c...

Recent studies report significant cross-national variation in the conceptual distinctions or "symbolic boundaries" used by majority groups to construct notions of "us" and "them." Because this literature compares only a handful of countries, the macro-level forces by which certain symbolic boundaries become more salient than others remain poorly un...

This article offers a framework for analyzing variations in how members of stigmatized ethnoracial groups establish equivalence with dominant groups through the comparative study of “equalization strategies.” Whereas extant scholarship on anti-racism has focused on the struggle of social movements against institutional and political exclusion and s...

On the Boundaries of Recognition. Internal and External Categories of Collective Identity.Drawing upon recent advances in the study of recognition and social identity, we trace changes in the categorization of collective identity among stigmatized groups in Israel, Northern reland, Québec, and Brazil. While the recognition literature commonly assum...