Maxwell School News and Commentary

He anchors ESPN’s flagship show, ‘SportsCenter,’ and is a Sports Emmy-winning host of ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ and ‘E:60’ programs.

“Social media works a lot like any other type of addictive drug,” says Alexandra Punch, director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. “When you utilize these services, it triggers dopamine responses and serotonin responses in the brain, so it also increases your craving for more of that same thing.”

"The reality is a ceasefire is needed now and that's not something the United States is willing to agree to. The most the United States is willing to do is a humanitarian pause, but that's not nearly sufficient. And on this, the United States and Israel are an outlier in the international community," Osamah Khalil, professor of history, tells BBC News.

It’s human nature to seek out information about additional threats in the days after an attack like the ones in Israel, so that people can avoid risk and reduce their anxiety, says Shana Gadarian, professor and chair of political science . But many of the social media posts circulating this week aren’t helpful, she says, because they don’t include a specific solution. 

Shana Gadarian, professor and chair of political science, co-authored a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology 3rd Edition titled "Emotion and Political Psychology."

The political scientist and media scholar will engage colleagues and students in nonpartisan, evidence-based research to foster dialogue in the public’s interest. 

"Speech may be free in the form of currency, yet the price we may pay in what follows our words can be steep. And some pay a heftier price than others—a cost often set by mainstream and social media," writes James-Christian Blockwood, adjunct professor in Maxwell's Washington programs. 

Entitled “Like-minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarizing” and co-authored by Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Thorson, this groundbreaking research published in Nature uses an on-platform experiment to examine what happens when Facebook users see dramatically less content from people who share their political leanings.

"Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing," co-authored by Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Thorson, was published in Nature. The study is focused on the prevalence and effects of "echo chambers" on social media.

"There have been women involved for a long, long time. For example, there was a very active women’s branch of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s. And many of those women, but not all, had been members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy," says Margaret Susan Thompson, associate professor of history and political science.