Is everyone a mix of straight and gay? A social pressure theory of sexual orientation, with supporting data from a large global sample.

Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, E.O. Wilson, and others have suggested that social pressure suppresses natural tendencies for humans to express bisexuality, the apparent norm for one of our two closest genetic relatives, the bonobo. An analysis of data obtained from a new online sample of 1,150,938 people in 215 countries and territories (63.9% from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada) who completed the English version of a validated questionnaire of sexual orientation lends support to this idea. A histogram of scores from 0 (exclusive opposite-sex inclinations) to 18 (exclusive same-sex inclinations) forms a near-normal distribution. Although this distribution was likely caused to some extent by sampling bias, it may also reflect the unusual honesty people show when taking online tests anonymously, as an increasing body of evidence demonstrates. We present a formal mathematical expression of a social pressure theory of sexual orientation, along with empirical evidence and computational explorations that support the theory. We also present an analysis of the new data set. Among other findings: sexual orientation labels corresponded to broad, skewed, overlapping distributions of scores. Self-labeled gays/lesbians and, to a greater extent, self-labeled straights, reported that the larger the mismatch between their sexual orientation label and their actual sexual inclinations, the more distress they felt regarding their sexual orientation, a finding that is predictable from cognitive dissonance theory. Educating the public about the true nature of sexual orientation might quell the often rancorous public debates on this topic, as well as give comfort to a large number of mislabeled people.

The Answer Bot Effect (ABE): A powerful new form of influence made possible by intelligent personal assistants and search engines.

We introduce and quantify a relatively new form of influence: the Answer Bot Effect (ABE). In a 2015 report in PNAS, researchers demonstrated the power that biased search results have to shift opinions and voting preferences without people's knowledge-by up to 80% in some demographic groups. They labeled this phenomenon the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), speculating that its power derives from the high level of trust people have in algorithmically-generated content. We now describe three experiments with a total of 1,736 US participants conducted to determine to what extent giving users "the answer"-either via an answer box at the top of a page of search results or via a vocal reply to a question posed to an intelligent personal assistant (IPA)-might also impact opinions and votes. Participants were first given basic information about two candidates running for prime minister of Australia (this, in order to assure that participants were "undecided"), then asked questions about their voting preferences, then given answers to questions they posed about the candidates-either with answer boxes or with vocal answers on an Alexa simulator-and then asked again about their voting preferences. The experiments were controlled, randomized, double-blind, and counterbalanced. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that answer boxes can shift voting preferences by as much as 38.6% and that the appearance of an answer box can reduce search times and clicks on search results. Experiment 3 demonstrated that even a single question-and-answer interaction on an IPA can shift voting preferences by more than 40%. Multiple questions posed to an IPA leading to answers that all have the same bias can shift voting preferences by more than 65%. Simple masking procedures still produced large opinion shifts while reducing awareness of bias to close to zero. ABE poses a serious threat to both democracy and human autonomy because (a) it produces large shifts in opinions and voting preferences with little or no user awareness, (b) it is an ephemeral form of influence that leaves no paper trail, and (c) worldwide, it is controlled almost exclusively by just four American tech companies. ABE will become a greater threat as people increasingly rely on IPAs for answers.

The surprising power of a click requirement: How click requirements and warnings affect users' willingness to disclose personal information.

What kinds of information and alerts might cause internet users to be more cautious about what they reveal online? We used a 25-item survey to determine whether the strength of Terms of Service (TOS) warnings and the inclusion of a click requirement affect people's willingness to admit to engaging in inappropriate behaviors. A racially and ethnically diverse group of 1,500 people participated in the study; 98.3% were from the US and India and the remainder from 18 other countries. Participants were randomly assigned to five different groups in which warnings and click requirements varied. In the control condition, no warning was provided. In the four experimental groups, two factors were varied in a 2 × 2 factorial design: strength of warning and click requirement. We found that strong warnings were more effective than weak warnings in decreasing personal disclosures and that click requirements added to the deterrent power of both strong and weak warnings. We also found that a commonly used TOS warning has no impact on disclosures. Participants in the control group provided 32.8% more information than participants in the two click requirement groups combined and 24.3% more information than participants in the four experimental groups combined. The pattern according to which people dropped out of the five different groups sheds further light on the surprising power of the click requirement, as well as on the importance of tracking attrition in online studies.