Professors Chris Wiggins CC’93 and Eunji Kim
EMMA ASHER
The interdisciplinary course is new this Spring, and is unusual for being taught by faculty members from two different schools: Eunji Kim, an assistant professor of political science who teaches at the College, and Chris Wiggins CC’93, an associate professor of applied mathematics and systems biology at Columbia Engineering; Wiggins is also the chief data scientist at The New York Times.
Very much of the moment, “Persuasion at Scale” explores the multifaceted nature of persuasion in the modern world, bridging political science, communication, journalism, marketing and public health. (Think: digital marketing, social media, misinformation campaigns, partisan messaging.) The collaboration is a first for Kim, who specializes in media effects in American politics, and Wiggins, whose expertise is in data and machine learning.
The course provides students with an opportunity to understand the role of persuasion in shaping American society, and to explore the intersection of technology, politics and human behavior. “Whatever you do, you always have to persuade someone, either individually or at scale,” Kim told Spectator in November. In the same interview, Wiggins said the topic of persuasion affects “anyone who owns a phone or has ever looked at a television or browsed the internet.” Indeed, one of the first assignments in the class is intended to help students learn more about their own media consumption habits.
“Persuasion at Scale” was launched thanks to funding from the 2024 Cross-Disciplinary Frontiers Courses award. The initiative was begun in 2023 by the Office of the Provost, with faculty invited to develop proposals for reinventing existing courses — or initiating new ones — co-taught by faculty from different schools.
The opportunity to get new and complementary perspectives on a relevant topic has great appeal: The room was abuzz that first day and the course had a lengthy waiting list. We caught up with Kim and Wiggins to hear more about their collaboration.
As professors at different Columbia schools, how did you two connect?
Wiggins: Eunji and I were both invited to a meeting organized by Bruce Kogut [the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics] at the Business School last February; it was a really multidisciplinary meeting, about how AI is going to impact society and communications and our perceptions.
I was very impressed with how Eunji had a lot of instinct for the real ways that people interact with media and data, in ways that I and other technologists are not so much thinking about. We work so much on the methods, and not as much thinking about how society engages with information.
Kim: I was thrilled and flattered when Chris emailed me and proposed teaching this class together — I thought he was one of the smartest people in that room. I have a joint Ph.D. in communication and political science, so I’ve had an interest in how people consume media for a long time.
How did you land on the proposal for “Persuasion at Scale?”
Wiggins: It struck me that one of the biggest problems for scholars is to understand what the impact of the information ecosystem really is, given that technology has changed the way that people engage with information. We have lots of anecdotes, we have our own lived experiences — which themselves are very different, depending on what type of information we consume. But it’s very difficult to know what impact any of it has.
I wanted students to know that it could be a math question. I think it’s useful to know that there are quantitative ways of answering these questions, and to introduce students to the fact that there is a scholarly field there — of trying to understand the effect of rapid changes in the way that society consumes information — and that it can be a complement to things that they will read in newspapers or stories that they will share, or their own lived experiences.
Because persuasion at scale actually does happen. Digital advertising is a type of persuasion in which the advertiser can say to the marketer, here was the causal impact of your marketing on people. And there is a body of mathematics there for optimizing which advertisement to serve, or which advertisement to serve to which people.
And so I want students to know that this is absolutely happening to them all the time. One of the themes that has emerged from our discussions is the students’ fascination with the use of digital data to understand human behavior and political decision-making. After one reading, many of them were surprised by the extent to which Google search data can reveal hidden truths about people’s attitudes and behaviors. Generally, students are seeing digital behavioral data, search engine analysis and social media trends as providing richer insights than traditional methods like surveys or focus groups.
Eunji, what role does your expertise in media and American politics play in the context of this class?
Kim: It helps to connect theoretical frameworks to students’ everyday lives. One of their first assignments is to reflect on their own YouTube consumption and analyze their own watch history data — this is a concrete example of how I incorporate my research into the classroom. Because my focus is on understanding what Americans actually engage with day-to-day, it makes it easier for me to introduce complex statistical concepts in an accessible and engaging way. For instance, I’ve explored how The Apprentice might have influenced Trump’s 2016 primary win, whether reality TV shows like American Idol and Shark Tank distort Americans’ beliefs about economic mobility, and how consuming cop shows like Chicago P.D. and Blue Bloods shapes views on the criminal justice system. These examples of media persuasion serve as a natural entry point for discussing statistical tools like econometrics and regression analysis. When discussing regression analysis, I might ask, “Can following social media influencers on TikTok influence someone’s political opinions?” This way, I help students connect technical methods to real-world questions.
And then, as a political scientist, I do sense that a lot of people are feeling like we’re currently living in a new political reality. All the norms are being shaped and reshaped, recreated. I think there’s a sense of, we’re in a new world, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. So the best thing we can do is just figure things out together.