Data Distortions and the Quantification of Fear

Albrecht, Kathryn

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-9mcj-km05

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Data Distortions and the Quantification of Fear

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The explosion of data in the digital age has provided new possibilities for policy creation,the development of knowledge, and societal innovations. In this way, data becomes an essential tool in personal decision-making, legal change, and policy creation as we leverage new forms of data to understand social phenomena. But along with the massive increase in digital data and data storage come new consequences and potential for data to be biased, intentionally misleading or completely false. I take this work one step further to investigate what can go wrong even when the data at hand is all technically true and not clearly maliciously misleading. I call this phenomenon a data distortion. I define a data distortion as when sociological processes inject bias and assumptions intodata that in turn shapes how society responds to perceived threats. In other words, how people absorb and understand different data available to them as they make decisions. Importantly, I propose that these data distortions can be located by interrogating new digital forms of data rather than relying solely on traditional custom-made data by social scientists. This dissertation reveals data distortions in news coverage, legal blameworthiness, and online housing markets and seeks to reconceptualize and reconstitute those distorted data to understand how changing the projections of true information changes the way people make fear-related decisions. This dissertation unfolds in three empirical chapters, preceded by an introduction to thefoundational concepts therein. In chapter 1, I interrogate the foundations of newsworthiness in homicide news coverage to demonstrate how distortions in homicide news create a universe of homicide that simply does not match reality, to the detriment of specific groups of homicide victims. In chapter 2, I go beyond the simple existence of news coverage to test how the contents of the news affects readers’ perceptions of legal and moral blameworthiness. In chapter 3, I test how a distorted data projection has economic consequences for consumer decision-making in online housing markets. Finally, I conclude with a look at the combined utility of these empirical projects and with an assessment of directions for future work.

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