On Social Networks as in an Echo Chamber

Social networks seem to be a valuable tool to collect comprehensive information and diverse points of view in order to take part in the democratic decision process as aware and mindful citizens. Social networks, though, risk turning into echo chambers, where individuals choose to follow only like-minded people and are continuously exposed to the same information and the same points of view.

Piero Stanig helped an Economic and Social Sciences student, Adrian Sordi, devise an experiment to check this hypothesis for his dissertation. Five-people-strong groups were asked to choose, through a super majority (4 to 1) vote, between two investment opportunities. The only information they could build on was a few articles they were allowed to choose among a list of titles. In a second step they could decide to share just one read article with the rest of the team and were called to decide whether to proceed to voting (and gain the whole prize in case of right decision with a super majority) or chat with the rest of the group in order to reach an agreement, but with a cut in the amount of the prize in case of success. "Varying the cut", Stanig explains, "we measured how much value they assign to the discussion".

In order to check whether the echo chambers that could result from the experiment design affect or don't affect the choice, a control group received information in a randomized way.

"We wanted also to check the level of frustration determined by the process", Stanig says, "so we asked the subjects if they wanted to play the game a second time following the same rules or preferred to try to gain the same prize playing a boring individual game". We have to wait until December – when Sordi will defend his thesis - for the main results, but the first data show that frustration affects around 10% of the participants.