Intended Audience
The psychology department welcomes Ashwini Ashokkumar as the second speaker in its 2023-2024 lecture series: The Psychology of Conflict and Peace. She will present "The Psychological Roots of Digital Echo Chambers: Understanding Political Polarization in the Digital Age."
There has been growing concern about the role that digital echo chambers play in political polarization. In this talk, combining findings from two projects, Ashokkumar will explore two possible psychological mechanisms through which echo chambers are formed and sustained. In the first part of the talk, she will describe findings from an analysis of the language of 270,000+ members of Reddit communities of supporters of the 2016 Presidential candidates--Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In the second part of the talk, she will describe findings from a series of experiments that examined censoring of belief-opposing content. Together, the studies highlight new pathways through which online contexts become homogenous and averse to disagreement. Ashokkumar will conclude by discussing implications of the findings for democracy.
Ashokkumar is an assistant professor of social psychology at NYU and the director of the WE-search Lab. Before coming to NYU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University and received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Free and open to the public.
This event may be used to satisfy the Lecture Reflection Requirement in PSYC206 and PSYC493/494.