So great. Thank you everyone today. It’s a real pleasure to be here. But I’ve had to start off my speech today with a little bit of bad news. And that’s whether you like to admit it or not, all of us in the room from time to time. So maybe this is a microphone. The green button. There we go. That’s how I build suspense. A lot of us in the room from time to time can be a bit like sheep. I’m sorry to say it. Sheep stay in the group often times and they do so for very specific reasons to stay safe from predators. Humans also tend to follow the crowd occasionally. We don’t have to worry about wolves so much. But we do so because we don’t want to be the sad orange man in this picture. We fear social exclusion. We have groups we like to belong to. So we’re pretty vigilant in our day to day behavior. We try to think about what is our own attitude and what do we think other people feel. When it’s congruent, when we think we’re in the majority, we feel great. But sometimes we hesitate when we see a discrepancy between how we’re feeling and what other people are feeling. This is compounded today because media are changing. And one of the biggest changes is no matter what, we know more and more now when we’re consuming content about what other people think. There’s a variety of examples. So online news are now being attacked more and more by keyboard warriors. I’m sure all of you are familiar with the most informed people on the Internet who tend to comment these online comment sections. Broadcasters saw the success of these online comments and they said, you know what would be a great idea? We should put these during television programs. We should spread the hate. Why should only online news have the fun? So now we see also that television programs are taking comments and putting them right on the screen as well. All this has amounted to the scary reality that no matter how much we try, we just can’t avoid knowing what other people think when we access media. And a lot of publications and organizations are having trouble with these trolls and online comments. How do we deal with them? Well in my research and the research of others, what we’re trying to do is say if we can understand why these effects are occurring, why we’re so persuaded by the crowd, then perhaps we can do something about it. So that’s very much so what I’d like to talk about just briefly today. But I have to be honest with you, this is nothing new. We’ve been studying the ways that we follow the crowd for quite a while. So many of you might be familiar with the example behind me. Without diving in too deeply, what I can tell you is if I asked you to compare these two lines and tell me which one were the same, I would hope that 99% of us could do it for a pretty smart group. But what research has found is that when you’re in a group and people give the wrong answer, that pressure from the crowd can make you give the wrong answer as well even when it’s obvious what the right answer is. At least in my eyesight and I wear glasses, right? So you can imagine online opinion can sway us even more so when the answers aren’t so obvious. Online comments, the likes on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, they’re all examples of public opinion. And we start to make assumptions about what other people think based on the online public opinion even when we know that those three or four comments on the news article probably have nothing to do with what other people think. Unfortunately, this is something that happens to us quite naturally. We like to generalize from small examples and make overall assumptions. So imagine today on the way to Frank if you came across this example of parking here in Gainesville. If a friend later asked you what was parking like in town, you might say, well, Frank was awesome, but let me tell you what, people in Florida can’t park. Now, obviously, this is an isolated incident, at least I hope so, but we still can’t get over this tendency, especially when we encounter negativity to generalize from specifics to the population overall. What my research suggests is that social media affects us in much the same way. You might be reading on Facebook and see three to four people who have had something nasty to say, but psychologically, we can’t help ourselves. We begin to make generalizations to the crowd, and from there, the crowd can have negative consequences for how we evaluate content. So the New York Times, if you encounter a con some particularly grumpy people, perhaps you assume the crowd overall is displeased, and from there, this displeasure biases the way you evaluate news. Leading us to when you take the exact same news in experimental contexts, people’s opinions of it in terms of credibility, in terms of importance, will vary entirely based on what other people are saying. So why does this happen? Why do we like to follow the crowd? Well, it’s not totally our fault. All of us simply just can’t think that critically on a day-to-day basis about every single decision that you’re trying to make. It’s quite hard, and unfortunately, the online environment has made it even worse. So if you go online to read news, you’re going to get thousands and thousands of articles, and we just can’t think critically about each and every one. So we rely on something on our day-to-day behavior called heuristics. Essentially, they’re just mental shortcuts. They’re quick ways of letting us sift through reality. So in the case of online crowds, we say, listen, if other people thought this way, then I should too. It’s an example of jumping on the bandwagon. I mean, this is why in my research, a lot of these comments seem to affect us. But that’s not always the case. Let me say that much. What I have found is that when we approach particularly controversial issues, things change a bit. So sometimes when the issue is relatively new or not particularly controversial, we’ll go along with the crowd. But when the topic is really polarized, we come into a situation where we also assume that what we think is representative of the group. It’s something called the false consensus effect. So we assume that whatever our opinion is, is the majority opinion. So we’ve conducted some research and asked, what happens when your opinion towards a controversial issue comes in contact with others and what happens when it’s either congruent with your feelings or not congruent? So not surprisingly, when you come across online comments that support your belief, you’re like, oh yeah, these people are clearly my people, representative of the population overall, similar to the self, going along with the crowd is no problem. However, when the topic is controversial and you don’t agree with the online crowd, suddenly we have a reversal of the bandwagon. You distance yourself from the group and you say they’re not similar to the self. So what do we do? Online comments seem to be causing a lot of problems. And in the spirit of Frank, I do think we should discuss some solutions. But I’m also not going to pass up an opportunity for shameless self-promotion either. So after this session, we have a scrum dedicated to this very topic. So I’ll provide you perhaps a brief appetizer. And if you’d like, you can come over to Maud’s Coffee and we can discuss this in more depth. But here are a few solutions. First, some online publications have said, listen, comment sections, you’re nothing but bad news, you’re going away. Especially after the research started coming out. So some places like Popular Science closed their comment section altogether. But I don’t think that’s quite the solution. In an open democracy and one that values discussions, perhaps we just shouldn’t take away a forum for open communication. So other news outlets, for example, take ESPN.com, have said, you know how we’re going to make discussion more civil? We’re going to put your Facebook picture next to your comment. We’re going to make it less anonymous. So that sounds like it would work, right? But has anyone been on ESPN.com today? It’s still not the friendliest place on the Internet, right? There’s still a few trolls. So speaking of our good friend, the troll, what do we do when these people frequent our online spaces? What we’re going to argue today in our scrum and what I love to talk about you more is that really, rather than it seems like we shouldn’t feed the trolls, I would argue that we should, we need to engage with them. And we need to realize that as producers of content, the story doesn’t end when we put it up online anymore. It’s going to surround our readers in terms of the opinion of others and we have to be active creators of content both when the story is written but also as the story is received. So thank you again for your attention. As I mentioned before, scrum mods coffee. We’d love to continue the discussion and thank you for your time.