Ideas Made to Matter
Report details COVID-19’s impact on the digital economy
MIT research about the pandemic looks at economic fallout, the impact of government interventions, digital technology, and fighting misinformation.
Apr 1, 2021
Faculty
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.
"Perverse Consequences of Debunking in a Twitter Field Experiment: Being Corrected for Posting False News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content."
Mohsen Mosleh, Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY: Forthcoming.
"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.
"Shared Partisanship Dramatically Increases Social Tie Formation in a Twitter Field Experiment."
Mosleh, Mohsen, Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 118, No. 7 (2021): e202276111.
"Surfacing Norms to Increase Vaccine Acceptance."
Moehring, Alex, Avinash Collis, Kiran Garimella, M. Amin Rahimian, Sinan K. Aral, and Dean Eckles, Working Paper. 2021.
Recent Insights
Ideas Made to Matter
Study: Emphasizing vaccine acceptance could boost immunization rates
Public messaging emphasizing that others are getting a COVID-19 vaccine is one effective way to overcome vaccine hesitancy, according to a new study.
Mar 8, 2021
Media Highlights
Press
Source:
The Week (India)
Study shows how pro-BJP toolkits get hashtags trending on Twitter
[Prof.] Dean Eckles [and co-authors] said their study provided the first systematic analysis of cross-platform campaigns.
Faculty:
Dean Eckles
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The Washington Post
A group of moms on Facebook built an island of good-faith vaccine debate...
... research supports the idea that social media can be a force for pro-vaccine persuasion, under the right circumstances.
Press
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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."
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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."