Ideas Made to Matter
MIT Sloan research about social media and misinformation
“Fake news” and misinformation peak online during presidential election years. Experts look at how they spread and what can be done to stop them.
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Dean Eckles
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Dean Eckles is the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is affiliate faculty at the Institute for Data, Systems & Society in the Schwarzman College of Computing.
His substantive research examines people's interactions with and through communication technologies, especially the ways these technologies mediate, amplify, and direct social influence. This work sometimes requires or benefits from new analytical methods, so Eckles also works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference.
Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook, where he worked on many product areas and analytical methods, including News Feed, messaging, advertising, tools for randomized experiments, and survey methods. Eckles previously worked in research at Nokia and Yahoo.
Eckles received his BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.
Honors
Eckles wins Amazon Research Award
Publications
Featured Publication
"Estimating Peer Effects in Networks with Peer Encouragement Designs."
Eckles, Dean, René F. Kizilcec, and Eytan Bakshy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 113, No. 27 (2016): 7316-7322.
Featured Publication
"Bias and High-Dimensional Adjustment in Observational Studies of Peer Effects."
Eckles, Dean, and Eytan Bakshy. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Forthcoming. Supplemental Materials. arXiv Preprint.
"Spillover Effects in Experimental Data."
Aronow, Peter M., Dean Eckles, Cyrus Samii, and Stephanie Zonszein. In Cambridge Handbook of Advances in Experimental Political Science, edited by Donald P. Green and James Druckmann, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming. arXiv Preprint.
"Shifting Attention to Accuracy Reduces Misinformation Sharing."
Pennycook, Gordon, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David Rand. Nature. Forthcoming.
"Shared Partisanship Dramatically Increases Social Tie Formation in a Twitter Field Experiment."
Mohsen Mosleh, Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2021. Download Paper.
"Targeting for Long-term Outcomes."
Yang, Jeremy, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon, and Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6224-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2020.
Recent Insights
Ideas Made to Matter
MIT Sloan research about the coronavirus pandemic
The latest working papers from MIT Sloan faculty about the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.
Apr 23, 2020
Media Highlights
Source: Los Angeles Times (Opinion Piece)
Why public health messaging should emphasize vaccine acceptance, not hes...
"...our research highlights how overstating or overemphasizing hesitancy can, by itself, keep others from getting vaccinated."
Source: FOX News
Political divide forms social media relationships, says MIT
"Our experiment shows that shared partisanship does indeed have a large impact on social tie formation."
Source: Los Angeles Times (Audio)
Column: How will Russian manipulation affect the 2020 election? We still...