Chris Bail
Biographic Data
| ID | 1752748 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Bail |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Bail |
| SIGNATURE | BAIL C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5310-2372 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 791 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Experiments offering social media users the choice to avoid toxic political content
Social media platforms increasingly offer users control over their feeds, promising to reduce toxic discourse. This study tests how the mere offer of algorithmic control shapes user experiences. Respondents evaluated identical posts from a fictional platform, with half given the option to filter out toxic political content. Those given this choice reported greater platform satisfaction. However, those who opted for filtering rated content as more…
A research agenda for encouraging prosocial behaviour on social media
Can Generative AI improve social science?
Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based models, and other techniques commonly used to study human behavior. In the second section of this article…
Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican an…
Exposure to Common Enemies can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Cooperation Experiment with Automated Partisans
Longstanding theory indicates the threat of a common enemy can mitigate conflict between members of rival groups. We tested this hypothesis in a pre-registered experiment where 1,670 Republicans and Democrats in the United States were asked to complete a collaborative online task with an automated agent or “bot” that was labelled as a member of the opposing party. Prior to this task, we exposed respondents to primes about a) a common enemy (invol…
Computational Social Science and Sociology
The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subf…
Prestige, Proximity, and Prejudice: How Google Search Terms Diffuse across the World
A large literature examines the global diffusion of institutions and policies, yet there is much less systematic research on how cultural tastes, consumption preferences, and other individual interests spread across the globe. With a data set that tracks the most popular Google search terms in 199 countries between 2004 and 2014, and drawing on Gabriel de Tarde, this article introduces a theoretical framework to examine how country-level differen…
Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization
Significance Social media sites are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that prevent people from being exposed to information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. We conducted a field experiment that offered a large group of Democrats and Republicans financial compensation to follow bots that retweeted messages by elected officials and opinion leaders with opposing political views. Republican pa…
Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation
Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These "cognitive-emotional currents" create an opportunity structure whereby advocacy organizations stimulate mo…
A Theory of Resonance
The metaphor of resonance often describes the fit between a message and an audience's worldviews. Yet scholars have largely ignored the cognitive processes audiences use to interpret messages and interactions that determine why certain messages and other cultural objects appeal to some but not others. Drawing on pragmatism, we argue that resonance occurs as cultural objects help people puzzle through practical challenges they face or construct. W…
Taming Big Data: Using App Technology to Study Organizational Behavior on Social Media
Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior-or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media survey apps (SMSAs) that adjoin computational social science methods with conventional survey techniques …
Emotional Feedback and the Viral Spread of Social Media Messages About Autism Spectrum Disorders
Objective. To determine whether exchanges of emotional language between health advocacy organizations and social media users predict the spread of posts about autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Methods. I created a Facebook application that tracked views of ASD advocacy organizations' posts between July 19, 2011, and December 18, 2012. I evaluated the association between exchanges of emotional language and viral views of posts, controlling for add…
Cultural carrying capacity: Organ donation advocacy, discursive framing, and social media engagement
Lost in a random forest: Using Big Data to study rare events
Sudden, broad-scale shifts in public opinion about social problems are relatively rare. Until recently, social scientists were forced to conduct post-hoc case studies of such unusual events that ignore the broader universe of possible shifts in public opinion that do not materialize. The vast amount of data that has recently become available via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter-as well as the mass-digitization of qualitative archiv…
The Public Life of Secrets: Deception, Disclosure, and Discursive Framing in the Policy Process
While secrecy enables policy makers to escape public scrutiny, leaks of classified information reveal the social construction of reality by the state. I develop a theory that explains how leaks shape the discursive frames states create to communicate the causes of social problems to the public and corresponding solutions to redress them. Synthesizing cultural sociology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, I argue that leaks enable non-…
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. This book demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expand…
The cultural environment: Measuring Culture With Big Data
The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks
Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream discourses or if they become part of the mainstream be…
The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in Europe
Recent studies report significant cross-national variation in the conceptual distinctions or “symbolic boundaries” used by majority groups to construct notions of “us” and “them.” Because this literature compares only a handful of countries, the macro-level forces by which certain symbolic boundaries become more salient than others remain poorly understood. This article provides the first panorama of these processes by comparing the relative sali…
Sur les frontières de la reconnaissance: Les catégories internes et externes de l’identité collective
Faisant appel aux études récentes portant sur la reconnaissance et l'identité sociale, nous analysons les changements dans la catégorisation de l'identité collective des groupes stigmatisés en Israël, en Irlande du Nord, au Québec et au Brésil. Alors que la littérature sur la reconnaissance tend à présumer une opposition nette entre « nous » et « eux », l'analyse de la littérature empirique démontre la complexification et la multiplication des ca…
The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in Europe
Recent studies report significant cross-national variation in the conceptual distinctions or “symbolic boundaries” used by majority groups to construct notions of “us” and “them.” Because this literature compares only a handful of countries, the macro-level forces by which certain symbolic boundaries become more salient than others remain poorly understood. This article provides the first panorama of these processes by comparing the relative sali…
The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks
Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream discourses or if they become part of the mainstream be…
A Theory of Resonance
The metaphor of resonance often describes the fit between a message and an audience's worldviews. Yet scholars have largely ignored the cognitive processes audiences use to interpret messages and interactions that determine why certain messages and other cultural objects appeal to some but not others. Drawing on pragmatism, we argue that resonance occurs as cultural objects help people puzzle through practical challenges they face or construct. W…
Computational Social Science and Sociology
The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subf…
The cultural environment: Measuring Culture With Big Data
Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation
Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These "cognitive-emotional currents" create an opportunity structure whereby advocacy organizations stimulate mo…
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
Sur les frontières de la reconnaissance: Les catégories internes et externes de l’identité collective
Faisant appel aux études récentes portant sur la reconnaissance et l'identité sociale, nous analysons les changements dans la catégorisation de l'identité collective des groupes stigmatisés en Israël, en Irlande du Nord, au Québec et au Brésil. Alors que la littérature sur la reconnaissance tend à présumer une opposition nette entre « nous » et « eux », l'analyse de la littérature empirique démontre la complexification et la multiplication des ca…
Cultural carrying capacity: Organ donation advocacy, discursive framing, and social media engagement
Prestige, Proximity, and Prejudice: How Google Search Terms Diffuse across the World
A large literature examines the global diffusion of institutions and policies, yet there is much less systematic research on how cultural tastes, consumption preferences, and other individual interests spread across the globe. With a data set that tracks the most popular Google search terms in 199 countries between 2004 and 2014, and drawing on Gabriel de Tarde, this article introduces a theoretical framework to examine how country-level differen…
The Public Life of Secrets: Deception, Disclosure, and Discursive Framing in the Policy Process
While secrecy enables policy makers to escape public scrutiny, leaks of classified information reveal the social construction of reality by the state. I develop a theory that explains how leaks shape the discursive frames states create to communicate the causes of social problems to the public and corresponding solutions to redress them. Synthesizing cultural sociology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, I argue that leaks enable non-…
Emotional Feedback and the Viral Spread of Social Media Messages About Autism Spectrum Disorders
Objective. To determine whether exchanges of emotional language between health advocacy organizations and social media users predict the spread of posts about autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Methods. I created a Facebook application that tracked views of ASD advocacy organizations' posts between July 19, 2011, and December 18, 2012. I evaluated the association between exchanges of emotional language and viral views of posts, controlling for add…
Taming Big Data: Using App Technology to Study Organizational Behavior on Social Media
Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior-or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media survey apps (SMSAs) that adjoin computational social science methods with conventional survey techniques …
Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform
Lost in a random forest: Using Big Data to study rare events
Sudden, broad-scale shifts in public opinion about social problems are relatively rare. Until recently, social scientists were forced to conduct post-hoc case studies of such unusual events that ignore the broader universe of possible shifts in public opinion that do not materialize. The vast amount of data that has recently become available via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter-as well as the mass-digitization of qualitative archiv…
Sur les frontières de la reconnaissance: Les catégories internes et externes de l’identité collective
Faisant appel aux études récentes portant sur la reconnaissance et l'identité sociale, nous analysons les changements dans la catégorisation de l'identité collective des groupes stigmatisés en Israël, en Irlande du Nord, au Québec et au Brésil. Alors que la littérature sur la reconnaissance tend à présumer une opposition nette entre « nous » et « eux », l'analyse de la littérature empirique démontre la complexification et la multiplication des ca…
The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in Europe
Recent studies report significant cross-national variation in the conceptual distinctions or “symbolic boundaries” used by majority groups to construct notions of “us” and “them.” Because this literature compares only a handful of countries, the macro-level forces by which certain symbolic boundaries become more salient than others remain poorly understood. This article provides the first panorama of these processes by comparing the relative sali…
The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks
Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream discourses or if they become part of the mainstream be…
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
In July 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a small fundamentalist church in Florida, announced plans to burn two hundred Qur'ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Though he ended up canceling the stunt in the face of widespread public backlash, his threat sparked violent protests across the Muslim world that left at least twenty people dead. This book demonstrates how the beliefs of fanatics like Jones are inspired by a rapidly expand…
The cultural environment: Measuring Culture With Big Data
Lost in a random forest: Using Big Data to study rare events
Sudden, broad-scale shifts in public opinion about social problems are relatively rare. Until recently, social scientists were forced to conduct post-hoc case studies of such unusual events that ignore the broader universe of possible shifts in public opinion that do not materialize. The vast amount of data that has recently become available via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter-as well as the mass-digitization of qualitative archiv…
The Public Life of Secrets: Deception, Disclosure, and Discursive Framing in the Policy Process
While secrecy enables policy makers to escape public scrutiny, leaks of classified information reveal the social construction of reality by the state. I develop a theory that explains how leaks shape the discursive frames states create to communicate the causes of social problems to the public and corresponding solutions to redress them. Synthesizing cultural sociology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, I argue that leaks enable non-…
Emotional Feedback and the Viral Spread of Social Media Messages About Autism Spectrum Disorders
Objective. To determine whether exchanges of emotional language between health advocacy organizations and social media users predict the spread of posts about autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Methods. I created a Facebook application that tracked views of ASD advocacy organizations' posts between July 19, 2011, and December 18, 2012. I evaluated the association between exchanges of emotional language and viral views of posts, controlling for add…
Cultural carrying capacity: Organ donation advocacy, discursive framing, and social media engagement
Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation
Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These "cognitive-emotional currents" create an opportunity structure whereby advocacy organizations stimulate mo…
A Theory of Resonance
The metaphor of resonance often describes the fit between a message and an audience's worldviews. Yet scholars have largely ignored the cognitive processes audiences use to interpret messages and interactions that determine why certain messages and other cultural objects appeal to some but not others. Drawing on pragmatism, we argue that resonance occurs as cultural objects help people puzzle through practical challenges they face or construct. W…
Taming Big Data: Using App Technology to Study Organizational Behavior on Social Media
Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior-or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media survey apps (SMSAs) that adjoin computational social science methods with conventional survey techniques …
Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization
Significance Social media sites are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that prevent people from being exposed to information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. We conducted a field experiment that offered a large group of Democrats and Republicans financial compensation to follow bots that retweeted messages by elected officials and opinion leaders with opposing political views. Republican pa…
Prestige, Proximity, and Prejudice: How Google Search Terms Diffuse across the World
A large literature examines the global diffusion of institutions and policies, yet there is much less systematic research on how cultural tastes, consumption preferences, and other individual interests spread across the globe. With a data set that tracks the most popular Google search terms in 199 countries between 2004 and 2014, and drawing on Gabriel de Tarde, this article introduces a theoretical framework to examine how country-level differen…
Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017
There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican an…
Exposure to Common Enemies can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Cooperation Experiment with Automated Partisans
Longstanding theory indicates the threat of a common enemy can mitigate conflict between members of rival groups. We tested this hypothesis in a pre-registered experiment where 1,670 Republicans and Democrats in the United States were asked to complete a collaborative online task with an automated agent or “bot” that was labelled as a member of the opposing party. Prior to this task, we exposed respondents to primes about a) a common enemy (invol…
Computational Social Science and Sociology
The integration of social science with computer science and engineering fields has produced a new area of study: computational social science. This field applies computational methods to novel sources of digital data such as social media, administrative records, and historical archives to develop theories of human behavior. We review the evolution of this field within sociology via bibliometric analysis and in-depth analysis of the following subf…
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
Reducing political polarization in the United States with a mobile chat platform
Can Generative AI improve social science?
Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online experiments, automated content analyses, agent-based models, and other techniques commonly used to study human behavior. In the second section of this article…
A research agenda for encouraging prosocial behaviour on social media
Experiments offering social media users the choice to avoid toxic political content
Social media platforms increasingly offer users control over their feeds, promising to reduce toxic discourse. This study tests how the mere offer of algorithmic control shapes user experiences. Respondents evaluated identical posts from a fictional platform, with half given the option to filter out toxic political content. Those given this choice reported greater platform satisfaction. However, those who opted for filtering rated content as more…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Social media (12 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works)