Cognitive Bias in Online Communication Activities (C-BOCA)

This effort will analyze publicly available online communication data, uniquely applying empirical results from the cognitive bias literature, to quantify the impact of cognitive biases on exposure to, use of, and propagation of online information. SoarTech, with its partners, will develop and evaluate methods to identify and measure cognitive biases in online information environments. The team will quantify the extent to which information is attended to by different populations, and subsequently incorporated in reasoning, as demonstrated by the further dissemination of that information by those populations. We will dynamically model responses resulting from online communication text, forecast responses of receptive groups based on observed streaming messages, and simulate potential further dissemination. We will rigorously evaluate our methods and models based on accuracy and precision, but will also consider computational requirements. We will incorporate our toolset into a larger system created to support planning of health communications (e.g., such as those conducted by the U.S. military in humanitarian assistance missions, worldwide; as well as efforts to support the health of our military and their families before, during, and after deployment)