It's possible to predict some violent public protests by tracking social media posts on moral outrage over a triggering event. Tracy Le Blanc/Pexels

Every grade school teacher knows that student conduct can get out of hand, fast, when a group of kids eggs on one individual. Time-outs are a testimony to the power of isolating one 10-year-old from a choir of buddies.

Social media plays a role similar to a gang of hyped-up grade schoolers, providing a community that can express collective disapproval of people or events. When this disapproval has a moral cast ⁠— for example, after a police shooting or the removal of a statue ⁠— the social network's particular characteristics are key predictors about whether that disapproval will turn violent.

There is a word for the way group support of a belief system makes it seem worth fighting for: moralization. Tracking social network activity now makes it possible to measure the chances for an individual belief to become moralized by a group ⁠— a phenomenon known as moral convergence.

In a recent study in Nature, Rice Business professor Marlon Mooijman, then at the Kellogg School of Management, joined a team that analyzed when and how violence erupts in protests. In a series of observation and behavior experiments that mixed psychology, organizational theory and computer science, they accurately predicted how violence is influenced by group discussion of moral views on social media.

The researchers started by studying the number and content of tweets linked to the Baltimore riots in 2015, after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. The researchers then compared these tweets with the number of arrests in a given time frame, using a methodology developed by Marlon Mooijman and Joe Hoover from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

To analyze the tweets responding to Gray's death, they first separated them into two sets: Those with moral commentary and those without moral judgments.

Next, the researchers tracked whether tweets with moral content increased on days with violent protests. Violence was measured using the number of police arrests, which the researchers compared with the specific time frames of moral tweets.

There was no major difference in the overall tweet traffic discussing Freddie Gray's death on days with violent protests and on peaceful days. The number of moralizing tweets, however, clearly correlated with episodes of violent protests, rising to nearly double the moralizing tweets on days with no violence.

This raised a provocative question. Were morally ⁠— based tweets a response to the events of the day ⁠— or were they somehow driving the violence?

To find out, Mooijman and Hoover worked with computer scientists Ying Lin and Jeng Ji of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Morteza Dehghani of the University of Southern California to develop algorithms that could establish mathematical probabilities for the results.

For every single-unit increase in moral tweets over a 4-hour period, the researchers found, there was a .25 corresponding increase in arrests.

The researchers then tried to measure the effect similar moral views ⁠— such as a social media page with self-selected members of a similar political affiliation ⁠— had on violence during protests.

To do so, they set up a second study, which measured participant reactions to the protestors of a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Participants ranked their level of agreement over the morality of protesting the rally.

There was a direct relationship between believing a protest action was moral, the researchers found, and finding violence at that protest acceptable. This relationship held true throughout the study, regardless of political orientation.

The researchers' next goal was to identify the impact of exposure to people of like beliefs. To do this, participants rated their feelings when they were told that most people in the U.S. shared their views. While the intensity of participants' moral views created the potential for violence, the researchers found, violence resulted when only actively validated by others with similar views.

Having one's moral outrage supported by others on social media, the professors concluded, may explain the spike in violence in recent protests.

While respect for privacy remains critical, governments and law enforcement can use the social media trend to pinpoint the moments when moral outrage can turn deadly. Perhaps most importantly, however, the research also suggests practical tactics for calming violent tendencies before they get out of control. To reduce real-life protest violence, they wrote, it's critical that social media sites include a variety of voices. It's another reason, if any were needed, that a bit of judicious exposure to other views is healthy for everyone.

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This story originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom.

Marlon Mooijman is an assistant professor of Organizational Behavior. He teaches in the undergraduate business minor program and MBA full-time program.

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TMC lands $3M grant to launch cancer device accelerator

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A new business accelerator at Houston’s Texas Medical Center has received a nearly $3 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The CPRIT grant, awarded to the Texas Medical Center Foundation, will help launch the Accelerator for Cancer Medical Devices. The accelerator will support emerging innovators in developing prototypes for cancer-related medical devices and advancing them from prototype to clinical trials.

“The translation of new cancer-focused precision medical devices, often the width of a human hair, creates the opportunity to develop novel treatments for cancer patients,” the accelerator posted on the CPRIT website.

Scientist, consultant, and entrepreneur Jason Sakamoto, associate director of the TMC Center for Device Innovation, will oversee the accelerator. TMC officials say the accelerator builds on the success of TMC Innovation’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics.

Each participant in the Accelerator for Cancer Medical Devices program will graduate with a device prototype, a business plan, and a “solid foundation” in preclinical and clinical strategies, TMC says. Participants will benefit from “robust support” provided by the TMC ecosystem, according to the medical center, and “will foster innovation into impactful and life-changing cancer patient solutions in Texas and beyond.”

In all, CPRIT recently awarded $27 million in grants for cancer research. That includes $18 million to attract top cancer researchers to Texas. Houston institutions received $4 million for recruitment:

  • $2 million to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to recruit Rodrigo Romero from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City
  • $2 million to MD Anderson to recruit Eric Gardner from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City

A $1 million grant also went to Baylor College of Medicine researcher Dr. Akiva Diamond. He is an assistant professor at the medical college and is affiliated with Baylor’s Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Houston students develop cost-effective glove to treat Parkinson's symptoms

smart glove

Two Rice undergraduate engineering students have developed a non-invasive vibrotactile glove that aims to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease through therapeutic vibrations.

Emmie Casey and Tomi Kuye developed the project with support from the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) and guidance from its director, Maria Oden, and Rice lecturer Heather Bisesti, according to a news release from the university.

The team based the design on research from the Peter Tass Lab at Stanford University, which explored how randomized vibratory stimuli delivered to the fingertips could help rewire misfiring neurons in the brain—a key component of Parkinson’s disease.

Clinical trials from Stanford showed that coordinated reset stimulation from the vibrations helped patients regain motor control and reduced abnormal brain activity. The effects lasted even after users removed the vibrotactile gloves.

Casey and Kuye set out to replicate the breakthrough at a lower cost. Their prototype replaced the expensive motors used in previous designs with motors found in smartphones that create similar tiny vibrations. They then embedded the motors into each fingertip of a wireless glove.

“We wanted to take this breakthrough and make it accessible to people who would never be able to afford an expensive medical device,” Casey said in the release. “We set out to design a glove that delivers the same therapeutic vibrations but at a fraction of the cost.”

Rice’s design also targets the root of the neurological disruption and attempts to retrain the brain. An early prototype was given to a family friend who had an early onset of the disease. According to anecdotal data from Rice, after six months of regularly using the gloves, the user was able to walk unaided.

“We’re not claiming it’s a cure,” Kuye said in the release. “But if it can give people just a little more control, a little more freedom, that’s life-changing.”

Casey and Kuye are working to develop a commercial version of the glove priced at $250. They are taking preorders and hope to release 500 pairs of gloves this fall. They've also published an open-source instruction manual online for others who want to try to build their own glove at home. They have also formed a nonprofit and plan to use a sliding scale price model to help users manage the cost.

“This project exemplifies what we strive for at the OEDK — empowering students to translate cutting-edge research into real-world solutions,” Oden added in the release. “Emmie and Tomi have shown extraordinary initiative and empathy in developing a device that could bring meaningful relief to people living with Parkinson’s, no matter their resources.”