Luke J. Matthews

Protecting Free Speech Compels Some Form of Social Media Regulation

Given the profound challenges posed by social media, corrective measures need to go beyond “deplatforming” bad apples. But how can the United States make such a structural change without compromising the democratic tradition of free speech?

The Promise—and Pitfalls—of Researching Extremism Online

How big of a problem is extremism in the United States and around the world? Is it getting worse? Are social media platforms responsible, or did the internet simply reveal existing trends? We have few answers because this research is easy to do poorly and hard to do well.

Outer Space and the Veil of Ignorance: An Alternative Way to Think About Space Regulation

There are currently no international binding rules that would address growing threats in space. Without more-defined and enforceable rules of war regarding space and space assets, the danger of a destructive conflict in space grows significantly.

The Meta-Lessons from COVID-19

COVID-19 has sculpted into high relief already recognized societal problems, which could be addressed once COVID-19 passes. Failure to do so could be a failure to learn the meta-lessons from COVID-19.

Journal Article

Within‐Physician Differences in Patient Sharing Between Primary Care Physicians and Cardiologists Who Treat White and Black Patients With Heart Disease

Within-physician Black-White differences in patient sharing exist and may contribute to disparities in cardiac care.

Journal Article

Evaluation Via Simulation of Statistical Corrections for Network Nonindependence

Many statistical techniques assume independence of data points, but networked data violate this assumption. Our network simulations indicate that eight commonly used techniques intended to correct this problem in networked data fail to do so.

Journal Article

Cultural Evolution and the Economic Wealth of Nations

This chapter reviews research on the cultural evolution of economic development around the globe, including the relationship between development outcomes and linguistic and religious ancestry.

Journal Article

Collective Action by Community Groups: Solutions for Climate Change or Different Players in the Same Game?

This article investigates how community groups solve collective action problems though data gathered across 25 organizations in three sites—Sitka, Alaska, USA; Toco, Trinidad; and a global site of distributed citizen science organizations.

Journal Article

Shared Cultural Ancestry Predicts the Global Diffusion of Democracy

Countries with shared linguistic and religious ancestry have similar democracy outcomes.

Research Brief

A Dangerous Web: Mapping Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism

The authors reviewed literature on racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE), analyzed social media data from six platforms, and created a global network map to better understand how to inform counter-REMVE strategies online.

Journal Article

Belief Correlations with Parental Vaccine Hesitancy: Results from a National Survey

We conducted a nationally representative survey of parents' beliefs and self-reported behaviors regarding childhood vaccinations.

Journal Article

Empirically Identified Networks of Healthcare Providers for Adults with Mental Illness

We develop new measures for care coordination between primary care and psychiatric care specifically for individuals living with serious mental illness.

Report

Mapping White Identity Terrorism and Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism: A Social Network Analysis of Online Activity

The authors reviewed literature on racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE), analyzed social media data from six platforms, and created a global network map to better understand how to inform counter-REMVE strategies online.

Report

Leveraging Machine Learning for Operation Assessment

This report shows how machine learning (ML) can support assessment of military operations by describing and illustrating the use of ML in systematically extracting assessment-relevant insights from intelligence, operational, and media reporting.

Report

Individual Differences in Resistance to Truth Decay: Exploring the Role of Reasoning and Cognitive Biases

The authors describe development of a survey measure that they used to examine characteristics of human cognitive processing (such as cognitive biases) and assess the results for individual resistance to Truth Decay.

Journal Article

Magic, Religion, and Science: Secularization Trends and Continued Coexistence

We conducted two studies, an American nationally representative survey and a comparative phylogenetic analysis of religious traditions, to test three hypothesized cultural evolutionary drivers for beliefs in magic.

Draft

Conflicted Information in Conflict Zones: Multidimensional analyses of social and traditional media from two case studies

Studies the patterns of information sharing on both social media and traditional print media in two contemporaneous conflict zones both with postcolonialism historical roots.

Commentary

Natural Language Processing: Security- and Defense-Related Lessons Learned

This reference document presents a collection of lessons learned by practitioners from RAND Corporation defense and security projects that employed natural language processing tools and methods.

Journal Article

Data Activism Against Gender Violence in Latin America

Google searches may help researchers find missing data on gender violence.

Report

Evaluation of the Military Spouse Employment Partnership Program: Report on the Second Stage of Analysis

In this second-phase study on the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP) program, the authors analyzed jobs on the MSEP Career Portal in 2016, interviewed participating employers in 2016, and then surveyed and interviewed spouses in 2019.

Commentary

Messaging Strategies for Mitigating COVID-19 Through Vaccination and Nonpharmaceutical Interventions

This Perspective addresses matching the message, the audience, and the sender in encouraging people to get a COVID-19 vaccine and discusses how to deal with misinformation.

Report

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Improve Air Force Talent Management? An Exploratory Application

In this report, RAND researchers explore an application of artificial intelligence that would enable the U.S. Air Force to leverage existing data for improved human resource management policies and practices.

Journal Article

Association Among Trust in Health Care Providers, Friends, and Family, and Vaccine Hesitancy

Parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their children trust various types of individuals along different dimensions of trust.

Journal Article

Thinking Outside the Altruistic Box: Why We Need Other Evolutionary Theories to Explain Why Religion Is Religious

This article reviews and critiques prior explanations for the evolution of religious beliefs and suggests new hypotheses that might be more productive for understanding why religion involves beliefs in the gods and the supernatural.

Journal Article

Women-centered Rituals and Levels of Domestic Violence: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Ritual as a Signaling and Solidarity-Building Strategy

Prior research suggests domestic violence against women to be more common in societies with patrilocality. Women-centered rituals build social solidarity to mitigate domestic violence. We find domestic violence is not particularly associated with patrilocality, but that women-centered rituals appear protective against domestic violence irrespective of post-marital residence pattern.

Journal Article

The Cultural Foundations of Modern Democracies

This article identifies which cultural values are closely coupled with changes in democracy across nations in the twentieth century, and tests whether changes in democracy precede or follow changes in cultural values.

Report

The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare: Social Manipulation in a Changing Information Environment

The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression, which RAND researchers are calling virtual societal warfare in an analysis of the characteristics and future of this growing threat.

Report

Hostile Social Manipulation: Present Realities and Emerging Trends

The practitioners of hostile social manipulation employ social media, forgeries, harassment, distribution of rumors, and other tools to cause damage to their target state. This report focuses on the information warfare activities of Russia and China.

Journal Article

A Moonshot for Extraterrestrial Communication

Speculating on recent efforts to establish contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.

Report

Who Plays, Who Pays? Funding for and Access to Youth Sports

To better understand sports participation rates for middle and high school-aged youths, the funding landscape, and participation barriers and enablers, RAND researchers surveyed parents, school administrators, and community sports program leaders.

Report

Community Citizen Science: From Promise to Action

In community citizen science, laypeople control research, working with professional scientists and performing research on their own. This report describes its potential uses, implementation needs and challenges, and ways to effect change.

Journal Article

Dealing with Culture as Inherited Information

Cultural inheritance is important but has been difficult to study (Galton's problem). This chapter illustrates use of new computational methods for doing so, although this will require gathering more cultural data than has been customary.

Journal Article

Panel Discussion: Moving Social-Behavioral Modeling Forward

This chapter describes panel discussion and debate relating to various multi-scale phenomena in social science, including emergence.

Journal Article

Book Review of Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity

In this book review I highlight the value of engagement between perspectives from the humanities that seek to improve conceptions of culture with perspectives from the sciences that seek to measure culture.

Tool

A Manual for Cultural Analysis

Many academic disciplines have formally theorized culture as socially learned information that can influence beliefs and behaviors. This tool combines methods from anthropology and related areas to create a manual to examine cultural data.

Research Brief

Data and Family Planning: An Evaluation of Two Programs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

This brief summarizes an evaluation of two programs to help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020. Both programs can improve promotion of country-driven agendas for data collection, use, and ownership.

Report

Evaluation of Two Programs Supporting Global Family Planning Data Needs: Assessing Achievements, Informing Future Directions

This evaluation of two programs that help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020 is based on qualitative and quantitative data from interviews with more than 260 stakeholders in 16 countries.

Report

Evaluation of Two Programs Supporting Global Family Planning Data Needs: Summary

This report summarizes an evaluation of two programs that help monitor progress toward a global goal to increase modern contraceptive use by 2020.

Commentary

The Promise of Community Citizen Science

This Perspective examines the transformative potential of community citizen science for communities, science, and decisionmaking.

Report

A General Agent-Based Model of Social Learning

This report describes a general agent-based model (ABM) for studying social learning, and uses that general ABM to explore the relationship between micro-influence and macro-dynamics for broad classes of problems.

Journal Article

A Simulation Assessment of Methods to Infer Cultural Transmission on Dark Networks

This study uses a comprehensive set of simulations to test three statistical approaches commonly used to infer social transmission of beliefs, behaviors, or information on illicit networks.

Journal Article

Mutualistic Cooperation — Why Religion Is Common but Saints Are Rare

This commentary on a larger focus article suggests that religion may improve wellness through mutualistic benefits that do not require truly altruistic cooperation and related cultural signaling systems.

Journal Article

Shared Cultural History as a Predictor of Political and Economic Changes Among Nation States

Political and economic risks arise from social phenomena that spread within and across countries. Regime changes, protest movements, and stock market and default shocks can have ramifications across the globe.

Report

Resources and Capabilities of the Department of Veterans Affairs to Provide Timely and Accessible Care to Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs health care system, with broad resources and capabilities, provides timely and high-quality care to most, but not all, patients. Meeting veterans' needs over the next five years will require additional capacity.

Report

Evaluation of the Military Spouse Employment Partnership: Progress Report on First Stage of Analysis

This first of two reports documents the first phase of RAND research to assess the Military Spouse Employment Partnership's progress in supporting military spouse employment and closing the wage gap between military and civilian spouses.