Was Facebook Manipulating Us? Maybe Not.

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A lot of folks are pretty upset with Facebook for “manipulating” them.  A recent study showed that Facebook adjusted the algorithm that posts notifications to your wall.  At various times, they let through more “negative” posts.  Other times they let through more “positive” posts.  Then they checked the tone of your status updates to see whether your posts trended more positively or negatively in response.

This study has a lot of people concerned about emotional manipulation via social media.  Should they be?  Dr. John Grohol of PsychCentral says, “no.”  Here’s his analysis.

…these kinds of studies often arrive at their findings by conducting language analysis on tiny bits of text. On Twitter, they’re really tiny — less than 140 characters. Facebook status updates are rarely more than a few sentences. The researchers don’t actually measure anybody’s mood.

So how do you conduct such language analysis, especially on 689,003 status updates? Many researchers turn to an automated tool for this, something called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC 2007). This software… was created to analyze large bodies of text — like a book, article, scientific paper, an essay written in an experimental condition, blog entries, or a transcript of a  therapy session. Note the one thing all of these share in common — they are of good length, at minimum 400 words.

Why would researchers use a tool not designed for short snippets of text to, well… analyze short snippets of text? Sadly, it’s because this is one of the few tools available that can process large amounts of text fairly quickly.

Who Cares How Long the Text is to Measure?

You might be sitting there scratching your head, wondering why it matters how long the text it is you’re trying to analyze with this tool. One sentence, 140 characters, 140 pages… Why would length matter?

Length matters because the tool actually isn’t very good at analyzing text in the manner that Twitter and Facebook researchers have tasked it with. When you ask it to analyze positive or negative sentiment of a text, it simply counts negative and positive words within the text under study. For an article, essay or blog entry, this is fine — it’s going to give you a pretty accurate overall summary analysis of the article since most articles are more than 400 or 500 words long.

For a tweet or status update, however, this is a horrible analysis tool to use. That’s because it wasn’t designed to differentiate — and in fact, can’t differentiate — a negation word in a sentence.1

Let’s look at two hypothetical examples of why this is important. Here are two sample tweets (or status updates) that are not uncommon:

        “I am not happy.”

    “I am not having a great day.”

    An independent rater or judge would rate these two tweets as negative — they’re clearly expressing a negative emotion. That would be +2 on the negative scale, and 0 on the positive scale.

    But the LIWC 2007 tool doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it would rate these two tweets as scoring +2 for positive (because of the words “great” and “happy”) and +2 for negative (because of the word “not” in both texts).

    That’s a huge difference if you’re interested in unbiased and accurate data collection and analysis.

    And since much of human communication includes subtleties such as this — without even delving into sarcasm, short-hand abbreviations that act as negation words, phrases that negate the previous sentence, emojis, etc. — you can’t even tell how accurate or inaccurate the resulting analysis by these researchers is. Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers.2

    Perhaps it’s because the researchers have no idea how bad the problem actually is. Because they’re simply sending all this “big data” into the language analysis engine, without actually understanding how the analysis engine is flawed. Is it 10 percent of all tweets that include a negation word? Or 50 percent? Researchers couldn’t tell you.3

    Even if True, Research Shows Tiny Real World Effects

    Which is why I have to say that even if you believe this research at face value despite this huge methodological problem, you’re still left with research showing ridiculously small correlations that have little to no meaning to ordinary users.

    For instance, Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07% — that’s not 7 percent, that’s 1/15th of one percent!! — decrease in negative words in people’s status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you’d have to read or write before you’ve written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.

    This isn’t an “effect” so much as a statistical blip that has no real-world meaning. The researchers themselves acknowledge as much, noting that their effect sizes were “small (as small as d = 0.001).”   READ MORE…

    The Love List Exercise

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    It is very easy to neglect showing love to your spouse in the little, everyday things. Lisa Popcak, co-author of “Just Married: The Catholic Guild to Surviving and Thriving in the first 5 years of Marriage,” gives some practical advise on how to proactively make time to love your spouse in the day to day things.

    Building Up Your Marriage by the Words You Choose

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    It can be very easy to get into the habit of making negative or harmful remarks to your spouse without even realizing it. But Lisa Popcak, Co-Author of “Just Married: The Catholic Guild to Surviving and Thriving in the First 5 Years of Marriage,” explains how to encourage your spouse and build up your marriage relationship by the words you choose.

    Today’s Cool Kids Are Tomorrow’s At-Risk Kids

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    A new study may provide both a cautionary tale for parents of cool kids and a moment of schadenfreude for adults who were bullied in childhood.   

    At 13, they were viewed by classmates with envy, admiration and not a little awe. The girls wore makeup, had boyfriends and went to parties held by older students. The boys boasted about sneaking beers on a Saturday night and swiping condoms from the local convenience store.  They were cool. They were good-looking. They were so not you.  Whatever happened to them?

    “The fast-track kids didn’t turn out O.K.,” said Joseph P. Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. He is the lead author of a new study, published this month in the journal Child Development, that followed these risk-taking, socially precocious cool kids for a decade. In high school, their social status often plummeted, the study showed, and they began struggling in many ways.

    It was their early rush into what Dr. Allen calls pseudomature behavior that set them up for trouble. Now in their early 20s, many of them have had difficulties with intimate relationships, alcohol and marijuana, and even criminal activity. “They are doing more extreme things to try to act cool, bragging about drinking three six-packs on a Saturday night, and their peers are thinking, ‘These kids are not socially competent,’ ” Dr. Allen said. “They’re still living in their middle-school world.”  READ MORE

    Prayer Promotes Bonding, Study Says.

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    Servant of God, Fr. Patrick Peyton, is famous for the slogan, “the family that prays together, stays together.”  In our books, our radio program and counseling practice, we strongly recommend both couple and family prayer as a way of increasing intimacy and responding to the differences that can divide.  Of course, this isn’t just true for families.  Prayer is the means by which Jesus’ own wish that all might be one in him (John 17:21) will be fulfilled.  As Pope Francis has demonstrated repeatedly and, in particular in his spiritual intervention with Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, prayer is the way to peace.  In fact, the researchers assert that despite popular concerns that prayer in public institutions would lead to conflict, the reality is quite different in that prayer is a uniting, not a dividing force.

    A new study from the University of Connecticut reveals the power of prayer to reach across cultural divides and build bridges in  organizations that make prayer a common practice even when its membership is made up of people from diverse backgrounds.  The study finds that interfaith group prayer serves as a “bridging cultural practice” in multi-faith community organizations.

    “The prayer practices we observed appear to play a crucial role in binding participants together across significant racial and socioeconomic differences,” says sociology professor Dr. Ruth Braunstein of the University of Connecticut.

    “They do this by being inclusive of multiple faith traditions, celebrating the diversity of the group, and encouraging individuals to interact with each other.”

    The study, published online this month and scheduled to appear in the print edition of the American Sociological Review, consists of data from a national study of multi-faith community organizing groups.

    These groups organize primarily through religious congregations in an effort to build civic coalitions that address a variety of issues, from health care access to crime. Such groups tend to be both racially and socioeconomically diverse.

    Nationally, more than 50 percent of board members of these organizations are non-white, compared to 19 percent of all nonprofit board members and 13 percent of Fortune 500 board members.

    Additionally, more than half the board members of the faith-based groups earn less than $50,000 a year.

    What Braunstein and her fellow researchers discovered is that, far from being a source of division, religious practices play a unifying role in such groups, even in those — like the one where Braunstein did her fieldwork — that include members from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions.

    Interfaith group prayers took place in about 75 percent of the diverse gatherings Braunstein observed over two years.

    Such prayers are defined by the authors of the study as a “bridging cultural practice,” meaning an activity that’s used to build shared identities across differences.

    By analyzing data from the National Study of Faith-Based Community Organizing Coalitions, the researchers found that the greater a group’s diversity, the more likely they were to incorporate “bridging prayer practices” like prayer vigils into their regular activities.

    “American society can learn a lot from organizations that are struggling honestly to embrace diversity….” said Wood.