Two groups of people can be persuaded to change their political views without ever talking to each other or seeing a single ad.
Political persuasion emerges from the way social networks are shaped and the signals distributed across different populations. Individuals pick up on the passions and preferences of their peers through indirect social cues rather than direct arguments. Many people believe that they are only influenced by the information and news stories they choose to consume. This study shows that the structure of our social graph can manipulate our opinions behind our backs. We are often the products of a network's geometry rather than our own independent reasoning.
Distributed Evaluative Conditioning in the Social Graph
SSRN · 6631698
<p><span>Existing models of digital political persuasion share a str</span><span>uctural assumption: the message recipient is also the influence target. This assumption is analytically incorrect for a class of operations where political content does not reach the target as an argument but is instead constructed within the target from s</span><span>ignals distributed across two populations that never communicate directly. None of the individuals involved receive direct persuasion. All of them par