What he shows is that subtle social cues such as an avatar's gender, ethnicity, or nonverbal behavior can affect how we perceive virtual others, how we respond to them and what effects they have on us.

Today, Bente talks about LLM avatars - and we do live in a time where agents do actually have embodied and nonverbal communication - many of things we learned in the very first media psychology lecture I visited are now *there* - opening new venues for research artificial others

Also, when you are digitally reinforced for sharing negative information about someone from the "other" party (i.e., likes for misinfo) - your own attitudes becoming more negative over time (Take care what you share!) --> people (also) hate to garner social approval & experience social relations

His work also shows that relational goals shape how we search information online, how we communicate with others using computers, how we adapt our own attitudes and how attractive we think others are (those we disagree with are of course more attractive, right)

Walther's work taught us that people are wired to form impressions of others—we use *every* cue to understand others and how they feel (like when your date doesn't respond to your texts for hours...). In short, we do need v.few "human cues" to like others, so relevant for today's AI-companion turn!

From his perspective, meaningfulness can be defined in terms of intuitive needs. He thinks this perspective could address some of the conflicts over whether meaningfulness must be "socially good," as it allows for both altruistic and egocentric needs that can be made salient through narratives.

Tamborini shows that moral intuitions are powerful unconditioned stimuli (= ppl respond), and implicit associations between these intuitions and other objects (e.g., political candidates) may be as powerful as framing (explicit associations) => Narrative media are powerful agents to learn from

So: how do narratives create meaning? One way is so-called framing—presenting neutral (e.g., political) content in a way that links it to moral evaluations (negative or positive)—and this framing then shapes how political actors are judged afterwards through processes of learning and conditioning.

Ron's work (scholar.google.com/citations?us...) teaches us how we choose stories, which role intuitive moral values play in this context, and how entertainment makes these moral values accessible, reinforces them, and helps us to feel meaning

Overall, we hope that our framework provides a useful lense for studying misinformation and designing interventions and regulations by raising awareness for this complexity, by enabling the targeted discussion of side effects, & hopefully by inspiring further work! PS: you can read it #openaccess 🤓

Very often we study misinformation through analogies: Seeing it as virus ( #infodemic), a weapon ( #informationWarfare), or a toxin ( #informationPollution). We did an extensive mapping of these analogies mileages & baggage showing what complexities they sytematically overlook