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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit! 🎧
You're scrolling. Endlessly scrolling. You see a meme. 😂 You chuckle. You see a sponsored post. You ignore it. You see a friend's baby picture. You smile. 😊 Another ad flashes by. You barely notice. Your thumb is a machine, a blur of constant motion.
This is how we live online. In a stream. A river of content. Yet, for years, researchers studied social media like a photo album. One picture at a time. Isolated. Static. Devoid of context. They were studying a single drop of water, trying to understand the entire ocean. 🌊
But what if they could study the ocean itself?
This week, we are diving into a mind-blowing new paper that is completely changing the game. 💡 It's titled "DICE: Advancing Social Media Research through Digital In-Context Experiments." This groundbreaking work is by authors Hauke Roggenkamp, Johannes Boegershausen, and Christian Hildebrand.
And get this—it was just published on August 13, 2025, in the Journal of Marketing, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world and a certified FT50 journal! 🏆 That's the academic equivalent of a blockbuster hit.
For too long, our understanding of social media behavior was flawed. Experiments were too fake. Real-world data was too messy, controlled by secret algorithms we can't see. But this paper introduces a solution. It's called DICE. 🎲
DICE, or Digital In-Context Experiments, lets researchers build a real, scrollable social media feed in a controlled lab setting. They can design the entire feed, place ads strategically, and then watch. They can track what you look at, for how many milliseconds, and what you skip. It’s a perfect copy of our digital world, but with the hood popped open for scientists to see the engine. ⚙️ They even built an app for it!
The findings are fascinating. The post you see right before an ad can completely change how you feel about a brand. An ad's position on the screen can be the difference between you remembering it or forgetting it forever. This isn't just cool theory; it's a new playbook for the digital age.
It makes you wonder about your own feed. Your own choices. Which brings us to our big question for today's episode: If the river of content we swim in every day is so carefully crafted to influence us, are we truly making our own decisions, or are we just going with the flow? 🤔
A massive thank you to Hauke Roggenkamp, Johannes Boegershausen, Christian Hildebrand, and the publisher SAGE Publications for this incredible research.
Don't miss our deep dive! Make sure you subscribe to "Revise and Resubmit" right now on Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Podcast! 📢 And for more amazing research breakdowns, check out our "Weekend Researcher" channel on YouTube and hit subscribe! 📺
Reference
Roggenkamp, H., Boegershausen, J., & Hildebrand, C. (2025). EXPRESS: DICE: Advancing Social Media Research through Digital In-Context Experiments. Journal of Marketing, 0(ja). https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251371702
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