Social science in a digital world

In a fast paced, digital world social science research is crucial to understand how new technologies are governed and how they impact people, businesses, economy and society.

Professor Matt Williams FAcSS is Professor of Criminology and Director of HateLab at Cardiff University. Research from HateLab is helping the Welsh and UK Government to identify and tackle online hate speech and crime, contributing to improved response times, better support for victims, and more effective allocation of resources.

Professor Sander van der Linden FAcSS is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge. His research explores the impact of misinformation, including how it influences people as well as what can be done to prevent its spread within society.

Watch the video below to hear from Matt and Sander about how their social science research is making a difference in our increasingly digital world.

Video transcript

Professor Matt Williams FAcSS:

Social sciences are key to understanding and addressing society’s grand challenges, and we have plenty of them right now.

I’m Matt Williams, I’m Professor of Criminology at Cardiff University and Director of HateLab.

So, the interdisciplinary nature of our work has allowed us to combine these sort of data science, AI, machine learning models with deep, sort of, sociological and criminological theory, method and ethics. And that unique combination has allowed us to build models that measure online hate at scale and speed.

And we discovered, for example, that in most cases, hate would flourish in the aftermath of what we call trigger events. As a result of that we were able to then inform policy but also operational decision making.

So with Welsh Government, the research became their foundational piece of data and insight for their hate crime policy.

With national policing, we were able to identify peaks and troughs for them around various trigger events that enabled them to deploy resources where they felt appropriate, potentially stemming the spread of offline violence.

Professor Sander van der Linden FAcSS:

So often we think about the spread of misinformation, we think about technical systems, but it’s also humans interacting with technical systems. It’s about human technology interaction.

I’m Sander van der Linden, I’m a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

So one of the things we found in our research, particularly when trying to help people, empower people to spot misleading content online, is this idea of inoculation or pre bunking.

And by pre-emptively exposing people to a weakened dose of misinformation or techniques used to produce misinformation, and by refuting that in advance, by exposing the playbook, people can build up cognitive or mental antibodies.

For example, we’ve designed interactive games, kind of fun games that simulate social media and simulate manipulation online that people can actually go through the experience.

But then there were also real policy impacts.

So, during the pandemic, for example, the government commissioned a game that tried to protect people from misinformation about COVID-19.

And we’re part of an effort including the World Health Organisation in the United Nations that helped scale that intervention to hundreds of millions of people early on in the pandemic.

Social science has a really important role to play in understanding why people believe misinformation, how it spreads in society, and what interventions can we build to protect people. And that’s what we work on.