Sanaz Talaifar - CGIS South S050

We will be in CGIS South, S050.

Abstract: Democracy is under threat in the U.S. and around the world. In this talk, I will discuss three key threats to democracy in the digital age: polarization (Study 1), authoritarianism (Study 2), and censorship (Study 3). Study 1 examines evidence for and perceptions of lifestyle polarization on a college campus. To measure lifestyle polarization, we quantified whether liberals and conservatives engaged in different social, movement, work, and leisure behaviors collected from smartphone sensors/logs and ecological momentary assessments at multiple temporal levels. We found that liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life, but not to the degree that people perceive. Study 2 takes a machine learning approach to examine whether theoretically-informed behavioral patterns collected by smartphones predict self-reported authoritarian values. We found that authoritarianism was predicted by behavioral patterns indicative of a preference for simple, confirmatory information as well as limited exposure to unknown people, places, and cultures. Study 3 uses an experimental paradigm to examine the antecedents and consequences of self-censorship in online forums. We found that the partisan makeup of the digital environment influenced the political opinions participants chose to self-censor, and self-censoring an opinion reduced the perceived importance and identity-relevance of the opinion. Together these studies suggest that political identity leaves traces in the digital environment (Studies 1 and 2) and the digital environment leaves traces in political identity (Study 3).