Twitter Drives New Insights in the Social Sciences

Twitter, Facebook and other online social networks are letting scientists take their research out of the lab and into the real world. Their research could radically change the way we view ourselves and the people around us.

In the past, scientists studying the web of relationships between individual humans and how they affect behavior had to choose between two tools: surveys, which often downplay the impact of a social network on decision making, and direct observation, which necessarily involves fewer participants than most real-world social networks. But online social networks have added a powerful new tool to the arsenal: huge communities of people whose interactions can be recorded and analyzed, providing an unprecedented look at the role of social networks in shaping who we are. Recent studies are revealing new insights about human behavior in ways that weren’t previously possible.

“Social scientists have not really been able to study social networks, except on a very limited scale,” said Michael Macy, a professor of sociology at Cornell University. “Now we’re able to study social networks on a population-level scale”