This project analyzes the previously unexplored questions of whether people’s online behavior spills over to their behavior in the offline world and what mediates the respective effects.

Employing a two-stage experimental setup, we first use field experiments on social media for online manipulations of our study participants. Second, we study the potential spillovers to our participants’ offline behavior in a laboratory setting. Specifically, we investigate whether attention from others on social media leads to a polarization of people’s political opinions and erodes their commitment to truth. We hypothesize that the treatment group receiving a relatively high levels of attention on social media will show more polarized profiles of political opinions.