THE DOWNSIDE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

Although research has shown that social networks are important for improving physical and mental wellbeing, they are not so helpful in times of immediate danger. New research has shown that faced with a common danger, people in a social network can delay making decisions that might save lives, fail to alert each other of imminent peril and spread misinformation. Those may sound like behaviours associated with COVID-19, but they actually surfaced in experiments on how social networks function in emergencies.

Hirokazu Shirado, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says he had expected his experiments to show that social networks, such as neighbours, work groups and extended families, would improve decision-making by giving people actionable information.

“What we found is that social networks make things worse,” says Shirado, who began the research while a member of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University.

His research involved 2,480 people, who took part in an online game in which they had to decide whether to evacuate in the face of danger. One of the problems, he says, is that people didn’t realise that they often use different strategies in times of danger. A person who reasons that ‘no news is good news’, for instance, might think that all is safe simply because they haven’t heard anything. They might then send ‘safe’ signals to other members of a group even though danger still lurked. In other cases, people might be unable to learn the truth because the people in their group share incorrect information.