When people feel threatened by an out-group, they focus their attention on a few voices in their own group rather than listen democratically to many different viewpoints — or so social scientists have believed. They’ve also thought that more politically extreme groups tend to be guided by a smaller number of influential voices. But no large-scale data backed up these theories — until now.
Former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Gizem Bacaksizlar Turbic and SFI Professor Mirta Galesic tested these ideas, publishing their results in Scientific Reports. They compared the network structure of comments in four publications with varying political persuasions — Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The Hill, and Breitbart News — after seven major news events. And indeed, the more extreme publications had few, highly influential commenters, while in moderate ones, influence was more evenly distributed. Furthermore, events that made a group feel threatened, such as the election of Donald Trump, caused that group to focus its attention more narrowly to a few influential individuals.
Read the study “Group threat, political extremity, and collective dynamics in online discussions” at doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28569-1