Being reminded of your political bubble can stop you from breaking out

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Using social media is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can connect us to many more people than we would otherwise interact with, which is great. But our choices regarding who we interact with (often amplified by a platform's algorithms) limit many of our social networks in a way that keeps us tucked within an echo chamber of people who think like us. And in that mode, our social interaction may exacerbate tribal attitudes towards people outside our groups rather than breaking down barriers.

For people studying partisan divides on various topics, there is a lot going on here. When people in a group work to understand information, everyone generally benefits. But the opposite can be true if we instead retreat to our mental fortresses, man the catapults, and prepare the boiling oil. So for a real-world problem like the partisan divide on climate change, how can we say if social networking is helping or hurting?

Douglas Guilbeault, Joshua Becker, and Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania set out to design an experiment that could test whether simple signals trip our mental defense mechanisms. Rather than gather a bunch of people in a room-where you might size each other up in ways the researchers couldn't control-they created a web interface that was used by 2,400 people recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service.

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