
  • Staff
  • Students
  • Library
Flinders University Logo Flinders University Logo
  • Study

    Study areas

    • Business
    • Computer science and information technology
    • Creative arts and media
    • Criminology
    • Defence and national security
    • Education
    • Engineering
    • Environment
    • Health
    • Humanities and social sciences
    • Innovation and enterprise
    • International relations and political science
    • Languages and culture
    • Law
    • Medicine
    • Nursing and midwifery
    • Psychology
    • Science
    • Social work
    • Sport

    I am...

    • a high school student
    • a non-school leaver
    • a future honours student
    • a future postgraduate student
    • a future research student
    • a future online student
    • a future Indigenous student
    • an international student
    • a parent
    • a school counsellor/teacher
    Explore
    Admission pathways
    Apply
    Contact us
  • Study

    Study areas

    • Business
    • Creative arts
    • Education
    • Engineering
    • Environment
    • Government
    • Health sciences
    • Humanities
    • Information technology
    • Law
    • Medicine
    • Nursing
    • Psychology
    • Public health
    • Science
    • Social sciences
    • Social work

    International websites

    • China
    • Vietnam
    Explore Flinders
    Apply
    Contact us
  • Research

    Research areas

    • Engineering and technology
    • Health and medical
    • People and society
    • Science, environment and natural resources
    • Emerging research - Defence

    Fearless Research

    • Research Changing Lives

    I am...

    • a potential collaborator
    • a researcher
    • a potential research student
    • a current research student
    Research impact
    Institutes and centres
    Partner with us
    Participate
  • Research

    Research areas

    • Engineering and technology
    • Health and medical
    • People and society
    • Science, environment and natural resources
    • Emerging research - Defence

    Fearless Research

    • Research Changing Lives

    I am...

    • a potential collaborator
    • a researcher
    • a potential research student
    • a current research student
    Research impact
    Institutes and centres
    Partner with us
    Participate
  • Engage

    I want to...

    • Engage with us
    • Connect with students
    • Locate a clinic
    • Book a campus venue
    • Find a tender
    • Give to Flinders
    • Work at Flinders
    • Participate in a research study
    • See what's on
    • Shop Flinders merchandise

    Related links

    • Flinders New Venture Institute
    • Alumni
    • Health2Go
    • Flinders University Museum of Art
    • Flinders One Sport and Fitness
    Business and government
    Community
    Culture
    International
  • Alumni

    I want to...

    • Join an alumni network
    • Establish an alumni network
    • Share a memory
    • Access career services
    • Order a transcript
    • Give to Flinders
    • Update my details
    • Find a classmate
    • Shop Flinders merchandise
    Our alumni
    Benefits and services
    Get involved
    Stay connected
  • Giving

    Donate today

    • Donate online
    • Donate by mail
    • Giving online FAQs (PDF)
    • Staff Workplace Giving Program
    • Contact us

    Ways to give

    • Give in celebration or in memory
    • Leave a gift in your Will
    • Giving from overseas
    • Give a cultural gift
    • Get involved

    Donate to
    Why give
    Our donors
  • About

    The 2025 agenda

    • Vision and mission
    • Our strategic plan
    • Our values and ethos
    • Flinders Village

    Governance and leadership

    • University Council
    • Chancellor
    • Vice-Chancellor

    Our organisation

    • Colleges
    • Library
    • Professional services
    • Staff directory

    Campus and locations

    • Sustainability at Flinders
    • Bedford Park
    • Tonsley
    • Victoria Square
    • Flinders in the NT
    • Flinders at Festival Plaza
    Fast facts
    History
    Structure
    Contact us
  • Staff
  • Students
  • Library
  • You have no saved courses.

    Continue to explore your course options.

     
    Explore our courses

    Your saved courses

    {{{courseName}}}
    mail_outline
    delete
    View all saved courses
  • Quick links 
    • Current students
    • Staff
    • Library
    • Flinders dashboard (Okta)
    • Ask Flinders
    • Flinders Learning Online (FLO)
    • Parking
    • Campus map: Bedford Park
    • Staff directory
    • Jobs at Flinders
    • Shop Flinders merchandise

 
  • Research 

    Research areas

    • Engineering and technology
    • Health and medical
    • People and society
    • Science, environment and natural resources
    • Emerging research - Defence

    Fearless Research

    • Research Changing Lives

    I am...

    • a potential collaborator
    • a researcher
    • a potential research student
    • a current research student
  • Research impact 
    • Research awards
  • Institutes & centres
  • Partner with us
  • Participate in research
  • Labs & facilities
Brave Minds

THE (ANTI)SOCIAL NETWORK

BM-Emma-Thomas.png

Associate Professor Emma Thomas

Institute & Centres

Torrens Resilience Institute


Article published on 13 November 2020

Back to BRAVE Minds homepage

The world has moved too quickly in 2020. Bushfires.
Relief appeals. COVID-19. 5G conspiracy theories. Black Lives Matter. Anti-lockdown protests. All these decisive moments have triggered surging social media interaction, and all demand clear answers as to why people react and respond.

This new, uncharted area of scientific research is the focus of Associate Professor Emma Thomas, and her expertise is in high demand.

Online technologies are providing a powerful lens that is magnifying critical aspects of social behaviour. This year, people have inevitably engaged more and with greater intensity online, prompting questions about many psychological aspects of online engagement.

“The technology may be new, but the psychology is old,” says Associate Professor Thomas, recipient of an SA Young Tall Poppy Science Award in 2018. “There is a set of psychological responses that probably have motivated political engagement and extremism since the beginning of time. Now we can see that these behaviours of people engaging in revolutions and political violence, or even misinformation and rumour, are being expressed and exposed on an immense, never-before seen scale thanks to social media.”

Associate Professor Thomas suggests that we are all participating in a vast global social experiment where online technologies make everything possible. “What motivates people to donate to relief funds, or take to the street in protest? What makes them co-act with other people who share their ideals about how they want the world to be? These are gritty scientific questions, underpinning real-world problems that need to be better understood.” 

Shaping such new research requires breaking down many accepted norms. The idea that people form groups based on their shared opinions – the subject of Associate Professor Thomas’s PhD study – was contrary to psychologists’ accepted view that meaningful groups are primarily based on gender, race or other formal affiliations. And for a field of science that focuses on social influences, very little research examined real, actual social interactions between people. Yet while other academics quibbled over the idea that people form strongly polarised groups based on social and political ideals, the global firestorm of online interaction began to take off. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter started to have a resounding effect and a new field of study gained traction.

Standing at the frontier of something so very new is daunting, but not overwhelming. “Sometimes people say to me that these events are so multifactorial and complicated, that they are impossible to study via the traditional methods of science. But I say if the human body, in all its complexity, can be studied by breaking it down to examining molecules, cells and enzymes, then we can use the same kind of methods to understand these social and political phenomena,” says Associate Professor Thomas. “We conduct experiments, but we’re still trying to describe and understand. Understanding the motives from the perspective of the person who is engaging is the first step. It’s only after achieving this that we can start to intervene more effectively.”

However, her studies also involve extreme groups, aiming to identify what binds them and maintains their belief structures. It ranges from right-wing extremists to groups sharing aberrant beliefs, such as anti-vaxxers or people who believe 5G caused COVID-19. “If you're the only person who thinks that the telecommunications network is making you sick, you would probably be treated as someone with a psychological delusion. If you share that with someone online and they agree with you, it’s no longer just an individual thought, but can become the basis for forming a new group around shared opinions and beliefs about social relations.

“The same mechanisms that can be used to organise good in the world can also explain how people mobilise around ideas that seem completely bizarre to someone outside of that group. The psychology has similar elements, although some of the key ingredients are different.”

Associate Professor Thomas’s perspective came from wanting to study what motivates people to make social protests. She initially studied psychology believing it would help her to get a job that involved working with people, but during the course her interest in unsolved questions about social influence ignited a passion for research. “It was the scale of charitable response to the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 that struck me,” she says. “Other entrenched forms of disadvantage don’t elicit the same extraordinary levels of public support, so my early work set about identifying what motivates people to support humanitarian causes.”

In 2010, the relevance of social media activity fuelling the Arab Spring democracy uprisings proved that her research had hit a decisive new vein of social analysis. “The speed of online engagement showed something new, that you could mobilise people who wouldn’t usually be interested in an issue and have them move beyond just an emotional response to actually put their money where their mouth is and try to change something.”

Much of her current work is attached to growing defence interest in cybersecurity that extends to online influence and misinformation. “There's strong national security interest in how people radicalise online and what forms of online interaction drive that increasing commitment to violence,” says Associate Professor Thomas. “Misinformation is different from disinformation. Disinformation is spread with intent to make someone do something you want them to do. These things have measurable impacts on communities and how they respond to threats.”

To identify trigger points around why people mobilise, Associate Professor Thomas seeks to discover why and how people engage in the first place and, on the flip side, when violence is adopted to meet desired social or political means. “People don't just go from not caring to taking up violence. We know that they engage first and only adopt violence because they perceive that other means are not going to work. It’s a complex psychological process that is unique to each individual but has elements we can identify. Patterns emerge.”

Associate Professor Emma Thomas

Such a rapidly changing area of research pulls together many resources at Flinders University, with ties to criminology, psychology and collaborative work with the Torrens Resilience Institute. The speed of change has also shifted Associate Professor Thomas’s worldview. “When I started in this area of research, I felt excited about the role new technologies would have in improving justice and inclusion for disadvantaged groups. That excitement remains, but now I see it also being used to co-opt more insidious forms of social and political conspiracy, misinformation, radicalisation. Protests and other forms of collective action are critical for a healthy, functioning democracy – we need people to engage. But the conspiracies that fuel societal division and political violence have enormous personal, social and economic costs.”

Associate Professor Thomas is now looking at the role of imagined futures and hope in inspiring people to engage with pressing social problems of climate change and global inequality, within an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project with Flinders Psychology colleague Professor Michael Wenzel.

“A lot of literature on activism and social mobilisation looks at anger as a really important emotional response in people who want to change the world. Fear is another important motivator. But we want to investigate the role of hope in allowing people to essentially overcome apathy, and whether it’s an antidote to despair.”

The early results have been surprising. “We're finding evidence that hope by itself doesn't really engage people. You need people to be angry as well. You need an angry hope to evoke change and not just a wistful hope.” 


BM-Emma-Thomas.png

Associate Professor Emma Thomas

Institutes & Centres

Torrens Resilience Institute

Article published on 13 November 2020

Back to Brave minds homepage

You may also like

OG-mental-disorder.jpg

Turning mental disorder on its head

A new plan represents a pivotal change in how mental health assistance is being sought and delivered in the era of COVID-19.

Learn more

OG-consuming-challenge.jpg

A consuming challenge

By the time the alarm bells ring, an eating disorder may already be well established. Seeking help early is essential for both individuals and families.

Learn more

OG-silent-survivors.jpg

Silent survivors

Professor Sarah Wendt doesn’t flinch when she asks tough questions of men who have instigated violence against women.

Learn more

Download your free copy of Fearless Research

Download Magazine

Flinders University Logo

Sturt Rd, Bedford Park
South Australia 5042

South Australia | Northern Territory
Global | Online

Information for

  • Future students
  • Alumni
  • Media
  • Business and community
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • External contractors

Directories

  • Contact us
  • Campus and locations
  • Staff directory
  • Colleges
  • Library
  • Research Institutes and Centres

Follow Flinders

Facebook - Flinders University Twitter - Flinders University YouTube - Flinders University Instagram - Flinders University LinkedIn - Flinders University

Brand SA logo Innovative Research University logo Indigenous communities

Website feedback

Disclaimer

Accessibility

Privacy

CRICOS Provider: 00114A      TEQSA Provider ID: PRV12097      TEQSA category: Australian University

Last Updated: 20 Oct 2022
Fearless Logo

This website uses cookies

Flinders University uses cookies to ensure website functionality, personalisation, and for a variety of purposes described in the website privacy statement. For details about these cookies and how to set your cookie preferences, refer to our website privacy statement.

You consent to the use of our cookies if you proceed.

Accept and continue