Interview with Jeff Hancock: "Social Media: Perception and Reality"

Dr. Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.

Dr. Hancock’s research focuses on social media, deception, and folk psychology. His lab uses the tools of computational linguistics to explore the social dynamics of digital environments.

“We have a very precise estimate [of social media’s effect on wellbeing], and it is zero.”

Jump to a question:

• Who are you, where do you work, and what is the primary focus of your research?

• How has the perception of social media evolved since you began studying it?

• How would you characterize the present state of the research on social media and wellbeing?

• What were the results of your meta-analysis on social media and wellbeing?

• Could you explain the difference between statistical and practical significance in effect sizes?

• What other methodological issues do you see in social media research? What kinds of studies should be done?

• Are different populations affected differently by social media (e.g., as has been claimed, teenage girls experiencing negative effects)?

• Do your findings bear upon the question of whether social media is addictive?

• Do companies bear any responsibility for engineering their products to be addictive?

• What do you think accounts for the strong sense people have that social media is addictive?

• How should an individual who feels they have a problematic relationship with social media respond to this research?

• Could you describe your research on emotional contagion?

• Does outrage spread through emotional contagion online?

• Do we blame social media for other problems of our time?

• Does your research on deception shed any light on how to mitigate the spread of misinformation online?

• If deepfakes spread, will debunking them undo the damage?

• Does the asynchronous nature of digital communication make people lie more?

• What are folk theories and how do they come up in Human-Computer Interaction?

• What role did folk theories play in the reaction to your Facebook emotional contagion study?

• Given that we can't help but use folk theories, what distinguishes serviceable ones from problematic ones?