Published Papers

Work in political communication has discussed the ongoing predominance of negative news, but has offered few convincing accounts for this focus. A growing body of literature shows that humans regularly pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, however. This article argues that we should view the nature of news content in part as a consequence of this asymmetry bias observed in human behavior. A psychophysiological experiment capturing viewers' reactions to actual news content shows that negative news elicits stronger and more sustained reactions than does positive news. Results are discussed as they pertain to political behavior and communication, and to politics and political institutions more generally.

Can the positivity bias, observed across various Social Network Sites (SNSs), predict the use of prosocial lies in a SNS such as Facebook? The positivity bias may be a product of politeness norms (i.e., positive face concern) that have influenced communication phenomena before these sites existed. In addition, positive face concern may also be affected by unconscious cues or primes that promote prosocial behavior on Facebook. We conducted an online experiment using current Facebook users to examine how positive face concern and surveillance primes affect prosocial lying in public and private Facebook contexts. Although positive face concern and publicness predicted the use of prosocial lying, positive face concern was not affected by the publicness and surveillance primes did not affect positive face concern or the use of prosocial lies in our study. This hints towards the nuance of positive face concern and the potential limitations of surveillance primes on prosocial lying behavior.

Commentators regularly lament the proliferation of both negative and/or strategic ("horse race") coverage in political news content. The most frequent account for this trend focuses on news norms and/or the priorities of news journalists. Here, we build on recent work arguing for the importance of demand-side, rather than supply-side, explanations of news content. In short, news may be negative and/or strategy-focused because that is the kind of news that people are interested in. We use a lab study to capture participants' news-selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Interest is associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. And results suggest that behavioral results do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content.

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Traditional theories have focused on the intentions of lower-class individuals to climb on the social ladder, yet they have paid relatively little attention to the motivations of upper-class individuals to ascend even higher. Addressing this issue, Studies 1 and 2 provided cross-national evidence that higher social class is associated with a greater desire for wealth and status. Moreover, by manipulating perceived social class, Studies 3 and 5 experimentally confirmed that compared to people in the lower-class group, those in the upper-class group express a stronger desire for wealth and status. Furthermore, in line with self-categorization theory predictions, Studies 3-5 showed that upper-class individuals tend to see and use wealth and status as important attributes in defining and categorizing self, and this tendency explains the effect of social class on desire for wealth and status. Together, our findings demonstrate a "having more--wanting more" relationship, and its consequences are further discussed.

A large literature in neuroscience and social psychology shows that humans are wired to be meticulous about how they are perceived by others. In this paper, we propose that impression management considerations can also end up guiding the content that investors transmit via word of mouth and inadvertently lead to the propagation of noise. We analyze server log data from one of the largest investment-related websites in the United States. Consistent with our proposition, we find that investors more frequently share articles that are more suitable for impression management despite such articles less accurately predicting returns. Additional analyses suggest that high levels of sharing can lead to overpricing.

Marketers distinguish three types of media: paid (e.g., advertising), owned (e.g., company website), and earned (e.g., publicity). The effects of paid media on sales have been extensively covered in the marketing literature. The effects of earned media, however, have received limited attention. The authors examine how two types of earned media, traditional (e.g., publicity and press mentions) and social (e.g., blog and online community posts), affect sales and activity in each other. They analyze 14 months of daily sales and media activity data from a microlending marketplace website using a multivariate autoregressive time-series model. They find that (1) both traditional and social earned media affect sales; (2) the per-event sales impact of traditional earned media activity is larger than for social earned media; (3) because of the greater frequency of social earned media activity, after adjusting for event frequency, social earned media's sales elasticity is significantly greater than traditional earned media's; and (4) social earned media appears to play an important role in driving traditional earned media activity.

We study the transmission of financial news and opinions through social interactions among retail investors in the United States. We identify a series of plausibly exogenous shocks, which cause "treated investors" to trade abnormally. We then trace the "contagion" of abnormal trading activity from the treated investors to their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors. Coupled with methodology drawn from epidemiology, our setting allows us to estimate the rate of communication and how it varies with the characteristics of the underlying investor population.

We show information spillovers limit the effectiveness of targeted debt relief programs. We study individuals who learn about the likelihood of debt relief from the recent experiences of workplace peers filing for bankruptcy protection. Peers granted bankruptcy can discharge debts, while peers facing dismissal lose all protections. Exploiting the random assignment of judges to bankruptcy cases, we determine that individuals with a "dismissed peer" are significantly less likely to file for bankruptcy or enter foreclosure. We highlight a novel channel relating social networks to household finances and identify additional costs of granting individual debt relief imposed on lenders.

Prior research shows that positive online reviews are less valued than negative reviews. The authors argue that this is due to differences in causal attributions for positive versus negative information such that positive reviews tend to be relatively more attributed to the reviewer (vs. product experience) than negative reviews. The presence of temporal contiguity cues, which indicate that review writing closely follows consumption, reduces the relative extent to which positive reviews are attributed to the reviewer and mitigates the negativity bias. An examination of 65,531 Yelp.com restaurant reviews shows that review value is negatively related to review valence but that this negative relationship is absent for reviews that contain temporal contiguity cues. A series of lab studies replicates these findings and suggests that temporal contiguity cues enhance the value of a positive review and increase the likelihood of choosing a product with a positive review by changing reader beliefs about the cause of the review.

A growing number of studies suggest that common ownership caused cooperation among firms to increase and competition to decrease. We take a closer look at four approaches used to identify these effects. We find that the effects that some studies have attributed to common ownership are caused by other factors, such as differential responses of firms (or industries) to the 2008 financial crisis. We propose a modification to one of the previously used empirical approaches that is less sensitive to these issues. Using this to re-evaluate the link between common ownership and firm outcomes, we find little robust evidence that common ownership affects firm behavior.

This paper provides first evidence of negative peer disclosure (NPD), an emerging corporate strategy to publicize adverse news of industry peers on social media. Consistent with NPDs being implicit positive self-disclosures, disclosing firms experience a two-day abnormal return of 1.6%-1.7% over the market and industry. Further exploring the benefits and costs of such disclosures, we find that NPD propensity increases with the degree of product market rivalry and technology proximity and disclosing firms outperform nondisclosing peers in the product markets in the year following NPDs. These results rationalize peer disclosure and extend the scope of the literature beyond self-disclosure.