My research

I study how social networks affect the way people think together.

My current research consists of two related streams of work. The first stream includes experiments designed to find the causal effects of social network structure on how people solve problems together. Projects in this stream address questions such as:

• Is “always-on” communication good for collective intelligence?

• How do social network clusters affect the diversity of information we find versus the diversity of our interpretations of that information?

• How does social network centralization affect our collective ability to adapt to new information?

My second stream of work focuses on the effects of digital communication technologies on the creation and transfer of information and knowledge. Projects in this stream address questions such as:

• On Twitter, do people exist in echo chambers, polarized groups, or something else?

• Do social networks convey a representative mix of information about the world?

• How does online group size affect engagement per person?

My work has been published in top academic journals including Management Science, Organization Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIS Quarterly and Social Networks. My research has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets.

Selected Publications

(see Research for abstracts and CV for full list)

“Network Centralization and Collective Adaptability to a Shifting Environment” (under review) (with Ethan Bernstein and Alice Jayoung Jang) preprint

“Forum size and content contribution per person: a field experiment” (Forthcoming) Management Science (with Jiye Baek) preprint

“How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence” (2018) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:35, pp. 8734-8739. 8/28/2018. (with Ethan Bernstein and David Lazer) pdf

“Network structure and patterns of information diversity on Twitter” (2018) MIS Quarterly 42:3, pp 849-872. (With Jiye Baek and Chrysanthos Dellarocas) preprint

“Facts and figuring: an experimental investigation of network structure and performance in information and solution spaces” (2015) Organization Science 26:5, pp. 1432-1446. (With Ethan Bernstein and David Lazer) preprint

“Spectral goodness of fit for network models” (2015) Social Networks 43:October 2015 pp. 16-27 (With Benjamin Lubin) preprint