Luca Braghieri

What You Can’t Say: Social Image, Communication and Political Correctness

During his visit at CES, Luca Braghieri plans to complete a project entitled “Social Image, Information, and Political Correctness”. His project studies experimentally whether social image concerns around topics related to political correctness on college campuses lead students to publicly state opinions that they do not privately hold, and whether such distortions diminish the informativeness of statements made in public. He finds that: 1) social image concerns drive a wedge between the sensitive socio-political attitudes that college students report in private and in public; 2) public utterances are less informative than private utterances along the two empirical measures of informativeness suggested by the signaling model underlying the experiment; 3) information loss is exacerbated by the fact that the natural audience in the environment, namely other college students, are partially naive about the ways in which social image concerns distort their peers’ public statements.

Mr. Braghieri has also co-authored an NBER Working Paper entitled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media” (joint with Hunt Allcott, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow). The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, the researchers found that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election 1) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; 2) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; 3) increased subjective well-being; and 4) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.

Luca Braghieri will soon be awarded a PhD in Economics from Stanford University, having specialized in behavioral economics and political economy. He holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University.