Emma Hoes

🚨New paper out in @PNASNews ! Existential AI risks do **not** distract from immediate harms. In our study (n = 10,800), people consistently prioritize current threats - bias, misinformation, job loss - over sci-fi doom! 💥👉 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

🚨New paper in @TrendsCognSci 🚨 Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? @Jayvanbavel and I review the “psychology of virality,” or the psychological and structural factors that shape information spread online and offline. Thread 🧵(1/n)

If Congress approves the science grant cuts proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%: from 95,700 students and postdocs this year to 21,400 in 2026 science.org/content/articl…

How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @Sacha_Altay’s & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is out via @knightcolumbia.

In this article, @Sacha_Altay @EmmaHoes93 and @mwojcieszak show that following the news on social media increases current affairs knowledge, the ability to discern true from false news, and trust in the news. nature.com/articles/s4156…

On this hot, sunny day in Madrid 🌞 during @europsa - happy to see this out in @NatureHumBehav 🚀 We show that, with the right incentives, social media cán do good!

The key figure -- key comparison is orange vs. blue. Headline in talking about x-risk doesn't detract from near-term concerns -- in fact, the effect is positive, but not statistically significant.

Is #socialMedia bad for society? In two countries, following a couple mainstream #news accounts on #Instagram or #WhatsApp improved knowledge, discernment, and trust without impacting #polarization, interest in #politics, etc. (N ≅ 3400). Preprint: osf.io/preprints/psya…

In November 2023, I gave an invited talk at the Digital Democracy Workshop at the University of Zurich, organized by Fabrizio Gilardi. I presented an early version of my work on two types of AI x-risk (lnkd.in/dmrP8kt6) to a group of political scientists. This talk sparked…

I wrote about whether the truth concerning AI and democracy is more boring than we'd like it to be:

A car attack in Munich just days before the election — was it a game-changer? Politico speculated it could boost the AfD, but the results tell a different story. Our research on the Utrecht attack shows why voters often rally around incumbents instead: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

You can find the Call for the 2025 EUI Alumni Conference here 👉bsky.app/profile/eui-al… What? 🧐 Reimagining the Role of Academia in Challenging times Where? 📍At our beloved Badia, in Florence When? 🗓️ June 11th Deadline for Submissions: March 14th 📨

Also for the Alumni Association the time has come to move to BlueSky! 🏡 We will remain on X for a little while to hopefully allow all alumni and other followers to migrate with or find us there! 🦋@eui-alumni.bsky.social See you on the other side 👋

Thank you to all participants to the Workshop on AI & Politics at @CPoliticaUB It was great to debate so much great work: aipsr.net/workshop-2-ai/

🎯"counter to the idea that gullibility to false information is the main factor underlying inaccurate beliefs, skepticism against belief-incongruent true information is much more pronounced than gullibility to belief-congruent false information" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

📘 Vol 63.4 How do voters evaluate abrupt policy U-turns? @Mo_Nasr_1 & @EmmaHoes93 conduct a survey experiment in 🇩🇪 to explore whether the motivation 💡 behind positional shifts affects voter evaluations of #PoliticalParties 🗳️ #OpenAccess 🔓 bit.ly/48lPOZe

Many people are sharing this graph, which seemingly shows reasons for why swing voters decided against Harris. Here's a 🧵 on why this tells us very little about actual motivations for vote choice. Method: Swing voters were presented with 4 choice pairs with the statements below.

More evidence that instead of being passively influenced by misinformation some people actively seek it 🔍 "Overall, it appears that individual choices are driving engagement with unreliable information sources from search, not algorithms." science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Elsevier is one of the largest, most hated and most influential academic publishing companies in the world. How it started & how it's going A thread🧵