About

Yuan Hsiao is an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University, who joined the faculty in July 2024. His research focuses on how social networks influence human behavior both online and offline, examining the structures of these networks and the social phenomena that emerge from them. Hsiao's work explores topics such as the impact of social media on protest movements and political participation, the spread of religion through personal relationships, and how community networks affect health-related behaviors. He employs a multi-method, multi-data approach, combining digital data, administrative records, survey experiments, and agent-based simulations to answer complex social science questions. Hsiao's interest in social networks was sparked by his involvement in street protests supporting freedom of speech and assembly in Taiwan in 2008, which was Taiwan’s first internet-based social movement. This experience led him to understand how social media connections can shape political and other behaviors. His research includes studies on how network structures on social media enable or inhibit protest participation, revealing a paradox where social media facilitates high-cost political actions like protests but limits the spread of low-cost behaviors such as online petitions. Currently, he is investigating how emotional content spreads through social media and influences political participation, aiming to understand how digital networks are shifting the dynamics of political behavior dissemination.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• Political economy
• Psychology
• Theology
• Criminology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Why people perceive protest violence differently: A cross-national survey experiment in the US, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

  Social Science Research · 2026-02-26

  articleOpen access1st author

  Scholars and activists have long debated whether violent protest tactics help or hinder social movements. Recent research suggests, however, that whether a protest is perceived as violent is often a matter of subjective interpretation rather than objective assessment. Building on this perspective, we examine how perceptions of protest violence vary across political contexts by comparing three societies with distinct protest histories and institutions: the United States, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Using survey experiments conducted in each society, we investigate how protest tactics, political alignment, and outcomes of police–protester conflict shape public perceptions of violence. We find that these factors strongly predict violence perceptions in the United States, apply only partially in Taiwan, and largely fail to explain perceptions in Hong Kong. In particular, U.S. respondents are much more likely than Taiwanese or Hong Kong respondents to view breaking into a legislative building as violent. Political alignment shapes violence perceptions in the United States and Taiwan but not in Hong Kong, while injuries to police officers increase perceived violence most strongly among U.S. respondents. These perceptions, in turn, influence individuals’ willingness to support protests. Taken together, the findings highlight the limits of U.S.-centric theories of protest violence and underscore the importance of historical and institutional context in shaping how protest actions are interpreted across societies.

  PublisherDOI

• How heterogeneous social influences affect tolerance of “violent” tactics: The case of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement

  Communication and the Public · 2025-04-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Under what conditions do violent tactics receive public support? Focusing on the process of social influence, this article utilizes a survey on the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Movement to test how social interactions with people with different orientations toward the movement (opposing, neutral, supportive) relate to individuals’ tolerance of violent tactics. Social interactions with neutral people generated the largest effect, as such interactions made people particularly intolerant of violent tactics. Interactions with opposition networks also led people to disapprove of violent tactics, although the association is weaker than interactions with neutral people. Interactions with movement supporters did not make people condemn violent tactics but instead increased their tolerance. Additional analyses show that such interaction effects hold across political affiliations. We discuss the implications for public opinion and democracy.

  PublisherDOI

• Toxicity and Moral Rhetoric in Video- and Text-Based Digital Platforms: A Multimethod Study of Political Talk Shows and News Articles in Taiwan

  Political Communication · 2025-10-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Public Perceptions of and Media Influences on Military Threats to Taiwan: A Method Triangulation Approach

  Communication Research · 2025-05-07 · 1 citations

  article

  To understand dynamic public perceptions of the potential military threat posed by China among Taiwanese audiences, the current study considers daily military data, news coverage on major websites, and online forum discussions, along with public opinion surveys. Time-series data for 7 months, integrated into vector autoregression models, support tests of pathways involving (a) changes in factual data to salience in news coverage, (b) changes in news coverage to changes in public perception, (c) changes in public perception to salience in online forum discussions, and (d) reciprocal relationships between changes in news coverage and salience in online forum discussions. Further tests address how the patterns of influence might depend on Taiwan’s polarized political and media landscapes. The results support motivated agenda-setting effects (impact of news salience among willing believers) but reject selective (partisan media shape partisans’ war perceptions) and resonance (issues aligned with the media’s partisan slant shape war perceptions) explanations.

  PublisherDOI

• Competing social influence in contested diffusion: contention and the spread of the early reformation

  Social Forces · 2025-05-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The spread of radical institutional change does not often result from one-sided pro-innovation influence; countervailing influence networks in support of the status quo can suppress adoption. We develop a model of multiplex and competing network diffusion to describe how competing actors compete through multiple types of networks. Specifically, we hypothesize three types of contested diffusion: market competition, inoculation, and firefighting. To apply the contested-diffusion model to real data, we look at the contest between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, the two most influential intellectuals of early 16th-century Europe. In the early phase of the Reformation, these two figures utilized influence networks, affecting which cities in the Holy Roman Empire adopted reform. Using newly digitalized data on both leaders’ correspondence networks, their travels, the dispersion of their followers, and parallel processes of exchange among places through trade routes, we employ empirical tests of our theoretical model. We find that although Luther’s network is strongly associated with the spread of the Reformation, Erasmus’s network is associated with the stifling of the Reformation. This is consistent with a “firefighting” mechanism of contested diffusion, whereby the countervailing force suppresses innovations only after they have begun to spread.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Network Agenda Setting, or Networked Framing? (Non)correspondence Between User and Right-Wing Media Semantic Networks on YouTube

  Communication Research · 2024-12-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How does media shape and reflect right-wing rhetoric in the U.S.? Theories of media effects have moved towards networked approaches to agenda setting and framing, but it remains uncertain how issue attributes or frames emerge in the U.S. media ecosystem in which users themselves can shape political rhetoric through discussion on social media. We provide the largest test to date of the different predictions of networked agenda setting (NAS) theory and networked framing , through a semantic network analysis of all 19,112 video transcripts and 661,958,464 user comments posted on the YouTube channels of four major U.S. conservative media outlets between January 2019 and March 2021. Both overall, and within key topics like COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter, we find that user comments diverge strongly from video transcripts, with users repeatedly introducing associations, emotionally charged rhetoric, and conspiracy theories not originally present. Our results challenge claims by network agenda setting scholars that “objects and attributes can be transferred simultaneously in bundles” from the media agenda to the public agenda, but are more consistent with scholarship on networked framing. We argue that future work should strive to synthesize both approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• Responses to contested information amid polarized politics: evidence from the US and Taiwan

  Information Communication & Society · 2024-11-25 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Exit-Voice Dynamics: How do Hong Kong People Respond to Democratic Backsliding?

  International Migration Review · 2024-03-28 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  Does people's greater intention to migrate deter them from participating in protests? How does protest participation shape intention to migrate? How does the relationship between migration intention and protest change amidst Hong Kong's transition to authoritarianism? Drawing upon Hirschman's exit-voice theory, this study examines the relationship between protest and migration intentions against the changing context across time. We use a time-series dataset on Hong Kong's anti-extradition movement of late 2019 for our analysis. The results show that people who have greater intention to migrate are more likely to participate in protest, but this association wanes as state repression intensifies. We find that migration intention indicates the psychological preparedness to leave, and that the fallback plan emboldens people to speak out. Yet, as the state becomes more repressive, people who intend to migrate are also sensitive to the signals about the repression, which thus attenuates protest participation. This also explains the phenomenon that more active protestors intend to leave to escape repression. People with radical political affiliations are more inclined to emigrate but this relationship attenuates over time, indicating the importance of group effects in curbing migration intentions.

  PublisherDOI

• Ideational diffusion and the great witch hunt in Central Europe

  Theory and Society · 2024-09-27 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The great upsurge of witch trials in early modern Europe remains a historical puzzle. Popularly known as the “witch craze”, this eruption of persecution is puzzling because belief in witchcraft had existed for centuries, but large-scale witch-hunting appeared rather abruptly, spread widely, and was remarkably brutal in comparison with the past. We define a theory of ideational diffusion to describe the general process of the emergence and spread of a new idea along with its prescribed behavioral change, in this case the adoption of witch-hunting. Ideational diffusion distinguishes between the adoption of new ideas, which lead social actors to reinterpret the world and thus to change their behavior, and the adoption of behavior alone. We relate how a new theory of witchcraft appeared in the fifteenth century and show that its widespread propagation, owing to the new technology of printing, matches our description of ideational diffusion. We then analyze the diffusion of witch trials in Central Europe by combining data on the publication of demonological treatises alongside climate, state capacity, religious economy, and city network variables. We find that cities adopted persecution after demonological treatises were printed, and that nearby trials induced neighbors to adopt persecution. Tracing the print vectors and social interdependence spurring witch-hunting helps us understand the general mechanisms behind the spread of persecution.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Rationality of Oaths in Armed Struggle: A Dynamic Model of Commitment and the Mau Mau Insurgency (1952–1956)

  Journal of Economics Management and Religion · 2023-06-23

  article1st author

  In this paper, we develop the rationality of oath giving and the socially functional role that oaths can play in securing the commitment of members of conflict groups. Oaths are a reoccurring feature of insurgencies, armed struggles, and revolutionary movements. Oaths grow out of a general set of cultural practices that leverage superstitious beliefs to perform socially valuable functions and to produce normative conformity within groups. Applied to insurgencies, we argue that swearing oaths can motivate and sustain commitment to a cause. We apply our theory to the case of the Mau Mau rebellion in which oaths played a conspicuous role. Originally carrying religious meaning among Kenyan tribes, Mau Mau leaders repurpose oathings to enhance commitment. In its repurposed form, oathing incentives relied less on supernatural sanctions and more on credibly threatening defectors with physical in-group and out-group punishment. The Mau Mau highlights how an old cultural form can be used to ground innovations and how superstition-based practices that confer group benefits might continue to do so by permitting the creation of worldly incentives even after (or when) the superstition is stripped from them.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Steven Pfaff

  5 shared

• Man K. Chan

  Medical Research Council

  4 shared

• Sascha O. Becker

  4 shared

• Diana M. Gibb

  MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL

  4 shared

• Tara Powell

  4 shared

• Abdel Babiker

  Omdurman Islamic University

  4 shared

• Lake Lui

  National Taiwan University

  3 shared

• Shang-Ju Li

  AmeriCares

  3 shared