School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Internet users engage more with phatic posts than with health misinformation on Facebook

Abstract: Social media like Facebook are harshly criticized for the propagation of health misinformation. Yet, little research has provided in-depth analysis of real-world data to measure the extent to which Internet users engage with it. This article examines 6.5 million interactions generated by 500 posts on an emblematic case of online health misinformation: the Facebook page Sante + Mag, which generates five times more interactions than the combination of the five best-established French media outlets. Based on the literature on cultural evolution, we tested whether the presence of cognitive factors of attraction, that tap into evolved cognitive preferences, such as information related to sexuality, social relations, threat, disgust or negative emotions, could explain the success of Sante + Mag’s posts. Drawing from media studies findings, we hypothesized that their popularity could be driven by Internet users’ desire to interact with their friends and family by sharing phatic posts (i.e. statements with no practical information fulfilling a social function such as “hello” or “sister, I love you”). We found that phatic posts were the strongest predictor of interactions, followed by posts with a positive emotional valence. While 50% of the posts were related to social relations, only 28% consisted of health misinformation. Despite its cognitive appeal, health misinformation was a negative predictor of interactions. Sexual content negatively predicted interactions and other factors of attraction such as disgust, threat or negative emotions did not predict interactions. These results strengthen the idea that Facebook is first and foremost a social network used by people to foster their social relations, not to spread online misinformation. We encourage researchers working on misinformation to conduct finer-grained analysis of online content and to adopt interdisciplinary approach to study the phatic dimension of communication, together with positive content, to better understand the cultural evolution dynamics of social media.

A free subalgebra of the algebra of matroids

Abstract: This paper is an initial inquiry into the structure of the Hopf algebra of matroids with restriction-contraction coproduct. Using a family of matroids introduced by Crapo in 1965, we show that the subalgebra generated by a single point and a single loop in the dual of this Hopf algebra is free.

Remarques sur l'Histoire du Texte des Éléments d'Euclide

Abstract: L'article s'interesse au debat concernant la traduction et les differentes versions des Elements d'Euclide. Cette enquete historiographique permet de degager quelques-unes des theses fondamentales admises par les differents protagonistes de cette polemique, leurs apports respectifs mais aussi les nouvelles questions soulevees.

Changement climatique : Dynamiques scientifiques, expertise, enjeux géopolitiques

Abstract: Resume En moins de trente ans, le changement climatique d’origine anthropique est devenu un enjeu, tant scientifique que geopolitique, majeur, concernant un nombre croissant de communautes de recherche, de partenaires et d’acteurs politiques. Une instance intergouvernementale d’expertise tres singuliere – le Groupe Intergouvernemental d’Etude du Climat (GIEC) – a joue un role determinant dans la reconfiguration du champ et tend aujourd’hui a devenir un ideal-type pour d’autres projets d’expertise internationale. L’objet principal de cet article est d’etudier la transformation du regime climatique, le role du GIEC, et les repercussions de cette evolution sur la communaute des sciences du climat en France.