Dean Eckles

About

Dean Eckles is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. He is also the Associate Director of the Institute for Data, Systems & Society in the Schwarzman College of Computing. His substantive research examines people's interactions with and through communication technologies, especially how these technologies mediate and direct social influence. Eckles works on applied statistics, design of field experiments, and causal inference to support his research. Prior to joining MIT, he was a scientist at Facebook and Nokia. He holds a BA in philosophy, a BS and MS in cognitive science, an MS in statistics, and a PhD in communication, all from Stanford University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Advertising
• Computer Security
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online

  Nature · 2021 · 1064 citations

  DOI

• Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 207 citations

  Social distancing is the core policy response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelter-in-p…

  DOI

• Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment

  2021 · 104 citations

  A prominent approach to combating online misinformation is to debunk false content. Here we investigate downstream consequences of social corrections on users’ subsequent sharing of other content. Being corrected might make users more attentive to accuracy, thus improving their subsequent sharing. Alternatively, corrections might not improve subsequent sharing - or even backfire - by making users feel defensive, or by shifting their attention away from accuracy (e.g., towards various social fact…

  DOI

• Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine

  Nature Communications · 2023-01-09 · 65 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Despite the availability of multiple safe vaccines, vaccine hesitancy may present a challenge to successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with many human behaviors, people's vaccine acceptance may be affected by their beliefs about whether others will accept a vaccine (i.e., descriptive norms). However, information about these descriptive norms may have different effects depending on the actual descriptive norm, people's baseline beliefs, and the relative importance of conformity, social…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global survey on COVID-19 beliefs, behaviours and norms

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2022-05-23 · 63 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eytan Bakshy

  53 shared

• Kiran Garimella

  Harvard University

  22 shared

• M. Amin Rahimian

  University of Pittsburgh

  21 shared

• Sinan Aral

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  20 shared

• David G. Rand

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  20 shared

• Mohsen Mosleh

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  17 shared

• Itamar Rosenn

  Meta (Israel)

  16 shared

• Avinash Collis

  12 shared

Labs

• MIT Sloan Data, Systems & Society LabPI

Awards & honors

• 2020 INFORMS eBusiness Section Best Paper Award
• 2018 Amazon Research Award

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• Catherine Tuckerh-60
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