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Resampling reduces bias amplification in experimental social networks

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 2084–2098 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people’s biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and evaluate mitigation strategies. Here we show under controlled laboratory conditions that transmission through social networks amplifies motivational biases on a simple artificial decision-making task. Participants in a large behavioural experiment showed increased rates of biased decision-making when part of a social network relative to asocial participants in 40 independently evolving populations. Drawing on ideas from Bayesian statistics, we identify a simple adjustment to content-selection algorithms that is predicted to mitigate bias amplification by generating samples of perspectives from within an individual’s network that are more representative of the wider population. In two large experiments, this strategy was effective at reducing bias amplification while maintaining the benefits of information sharing. Simulations show that this algorithm can also be effective in more complex networks.

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Fig. 1: Trial structure.
Fig. 2: Experiment 1 details and results.
Fig. 3: Experiment 2 details and results.
Fig. 4: Experiment 3 results.

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Data availability

Experiment and simulation data for this study are available through the Open Science Repository at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YTH5R.

Code availability

Code for both experiments, data analyses and simulations are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YTH5R, which contains an archived version of a GitHub repository containing all of the experiment code. Both experiments were built using Dallinger (Experiment 1: 5.1.0; Experiment 2: custom fork; Experiment 3: 9.0.0). The resampling algorithm in Experiments 2 and 3 were implemented in Python (3.9) using NumPyro (0.7.2). The resampling algorithm for the power analyses and the psychometric models of Experiment 1 were implemented in R using Rstan (2.21.3). The predictions shown in Extended Data Fig. 1 were generated using MATLAB. Mixed effects models were implemented in R (4.1.2) using lme4 (1.1.28). Network simulations were done in Python (3.10.4) using the NetworkX library (3.1).

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Acknowledgements

This work was made possible with funding T.L.G. received from the NOMIS Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mathew D. Hardy, Bill D. Thompson.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Mathew D. Hardy & Thomas L. Griffiths

  2. Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Bill D. Thompson

  3. Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, London, UK

    P. M. Krafft

  4. Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Thomas L. Griffiths

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Contributions

All authors contributed to designing the experiment, developing the mitigation algorithm, and writing the paper. M.D.H. and B.D.T. implemented and ran the experiments and simulations. M.D.H. analysed the results.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mathew D. Hardy.

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Competing interests

T.L.G. has previously received research funding from Facebook/Meta, a social media company. This funding was for a separate research project and has not supported this research. The authors declare no other competing interests.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Stationary distributions for social networks.

(a) Stationary distributions on the proportion of people endorsing green as a function of the bias β towards green, for different levels of sensitivity to social information α. The bias translates into a stationary distribution strongly skewed towards green, with increasing effect as α increases. (b) Average proportion of green judgements under this stationary distribution, compared against the bias of a single individual. The social network amplifies individual biases. Because bias β and the information from the stimulus γd have the same effect in the mathematical equation on judgements, this model predicts that the effects of both will be exaggerated by participating in a social network: people will become more biased, but also more accurate. Note that this analysis could be equivalently stated in terms of blue bias and blue judgements.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Experiment 1 yoking structure and marked colour design.

All participants in the first wave were assigned to an asocial condition. In the second wave, social participants observed the judgements made by first-wave asocial participants in the same motivated condition and network index (see Methods, Experiment 1). Each network consisted of four participants with a marked colour of blue and four of green at each wave. A participant’s marked colour determined the colour of the dots in the stimulus (dot sizes and positions were fixed in a wave and network). To match this colour-swapping, social information was also presented in terms of the participant’s marked colour. That is, if 5 of 8 people chose their marked colour in the previous wave, participants with a marked colour of green would be told that 5 of 8 people chose green, and participants with a marked colour of blue that 5 of 8 participants chose blue. Marked colour corresponded to motivated colour for participants in motivated conditions. Participants in neutral conditions were assigned marked colours using an identical process, but were not informed of their marked colour.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Experiment 2 participant observations and estimated biases.

The resampling algorithm increased consensus between networks with induced biases towards green and blue. (a) Each bar shows the proportion of green judgements from the previous wave that each participant (n=784 for both conditions) observed over all 16 trials of the experiment. Bars are arranged in descending order, and bar colour corresponds to the participant’s motivated colour. (b) Estimated participant biases and transmission rates in the Social/Resampling condition. In our resampling algorithm, each participant’s judgement could be propagated multiple times to a participant at the next wave. Rather than only propagating judgements made by those with low estimated bias, the algorithm transmitted each participant’s judgements at similar rates. Points show the estimated green biases of participants in the Asocial/Motivated (wave 1) and Social/Motivated (waves 2-7) condition and the number of times their judgements were transmitted.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Simulation design.

For the network simulations and power analyses, we alternated between simulating participants’ judgements and the effects of our resampling procedure. We first fit the parameters \({\tilde{\Phi }}\) of the oracle models to Experiment 1 data Xe1 using Markov Chain Monte Carlo. One model was fit to Asocial/Motivated participants, and one to Social/Motivated participants. For the power analyses, at each wave t, we used either the asocial (wave 1) or social (waves 2-8) oracle to sample participant biases θt and simulate judgements θt (this process is illustrated here). By contrast, for the network simulations, we sampled a set of participant biases θ using the social oracle model and used these parameters to simulate judgements Xt at each iteration (there was no population turnover in our network simulations). To simulate our resampling procedure, we then fit IRT parameters θt to the simulated judgements at each wave. As in Experiments 1 and 2, these IRT models did not have access to the ground truth or participants’ true biases. We used our fitted IRT model to determine the importance weights wt for each judgement and resample a set of judgements \({\tilde{X}}_{{{{\rm{t}}}}}\) to propagate to the next wave or iteration. For each simulation, we repeated this process for 8 waves (the same fitted oracle model was used in all simulations).

Extended Data Fig. 5 Network simulation results.

Plots show the proportion of (a) bias-aligned and (b) correct judgements by iteration. Simulated participants in the first iteration made their judgements asocially. For each set of simulations, two histories were sampled starting at the second iteration; one where participants viewed the judgements made by their parents in the previous iteration (Social/Neutral), and one where these judgements were resampled using our algorithm (Social/Resampling). The same constructed networks were used for both histories, with one populated by simulated participant "paid" for blue dots, and one by simulated participant "paid" for green. Error bars show the standard errors of the proportions (n=204,800, 409600, and 819,200 for each point in the networks with 64, 128, and 256 participants, respectively).

Extended Data Table 1 Experiment 1 results
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Extended Data Table 2 Parameter estimates from the psychometric models fit to Experiment 1
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Extended Data Table 3 Experiment 2 results
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Extended Data Table 4 Experiment 3 results
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Extended Data Table 5 Network simulation results
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Hardy, M.D., Thompson, B.D., Krafft, P.M. et al. Resampling reduces bias amplification in experimental social networks. Nat Hum Behav 7, 2084–2098 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01715-5

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