Episode 136—Molly Offer-Westort: "I was interested in exploring the world more and having different experiences."

From being an English teacher in Central Lesotho to being a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar to working with the World Bank and the United Nations, Assistant Professor Molly Offer-Westort chose to experience various opportunities before embarking on an academic life. Now, she uses data science and statistical tools to understand people's online behaviors and help policymakers make better decisions. Tune in to hear Professor Offer-Westort talk about her childhood dreams and how her research now contributes to the public in understanding the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. 

Transcript

Stephen00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Molly Offer-Westort of the Department of Political Science. Professor Offer-Westort holds a joint PhD in political science and statistics and data science from Yale University. Her research involves social media experiments that examine online behavior to understand how people change views and attitudes in response to information they engage with online. She's here today to speak with us a little about her work and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Offer-Westort, thank you so much for joining me this morning. How are you doing? 

Molly Offer-Westort 00:35
I'm great. How are you? 

Stephen 00:36
I'm doing very well, thank you. Just to get the basics covered first, can you tell us what your position is at UChicago and just like a little bit in your own terms of like what you study, what your research interests are?

Molly Offer-Westort 00:50
Sure. So I'm an assistant professor in the political science department. I work on quantitative methods. I see myself as a methodologist for the social sciences broadly. So I work on research design, statistical analysis, kind of the methods. that we use in the social sciences for asking and answering questions.

Stephen 01:09
We like to start at the beginning. So, going way back when you were a kid, what did you imagine you would end up doing or what did you, you know, hope to like pursue?

Molly Offer-Westort 01:19
Oh, I really wanted to be an astronaut. I listened to these books on tape adventures in the solar system and adventures beyond the solar system and I really wanted to go into space, explore the stars, but I found out when I was eight, I went to the eye doctors and found out that I would need glasses and my understanding then as it is now is that to be an astronaut, you need to have perfect vision. So when I found out that I would need glasses, I was absolutely inconsolable that I would not be able to pursue my dream of becoming an astronaut. So I've needed to consider different alternatives, but I think it's ended up all right for me anyhow. 

Stephen02:01
Yeah, I mean, in academia, you have to have glasses, right? 

Molly Offer-Westort02:04
I guess, basically. So, I picked the right path for myself. 

Stephen02:07
Have you seen, by the way, that just reminded me, have you seen Little Miss Sunshine? 

Molly Offer-Westort02:10
Yes, no, it was exactly like that. It's exactly like that. That was my experience. Fortunately, I was a little bit younger, so I had more time to kind of turn things around. 

Stephen02:20
All right, well, yes, you bounced back nicely. What about when you were, like, thinking about college, kind of like, you know, senior year of high school or even like early college. Where did you see your interests taking you at that point?

Molly Offer-Westort02:35
I was really interested in international development. And that's kind of the area where I saw myself going into. I didn't see myself going into academia at all when I was an undergraduate in college. I remember saying as an undergraduate graduate that my grades didn't matter because I wasn't going to be an academic. So I was planning to work in organizations like USAID or nonprofits internationally was what I was intending to do. 

Stephen03:07 
What did that path then like look like in terms of like what you were studying in undergrad? 

Molly Offer-Westort03:11
I studied cultural anthropology, and actually I was really fortunate as an undergraduate at Grinnell College to work with Doug Calkins, who was in the anthropology department. Grinnell College is an undergraduate only institution. So it's not research oriented, like a lot of, big universities that have large graduate departments with faculty working with grad students.

But Doug was really great about working with undergrads to do research. And so I benefited from working with him over a couple of summers at Grinnell, working on research projects. That kind of got me on the path to thinking about cultural anthropology. But I wasn't intending to go into a PhD at that point in time. 

Stephen 03:46
 Yeah, I mean, what do you think drew you to that field? And also like what kind of, you know, what kind of questions I guess, were you starting to ask?

Molly Offer-Westort 03:53
Oh, that's a good question. It's so hard to think about kind of what were my motivations at that point in time when I was such a young person. 

Stephen 04:03
Yeah, sure. 

Molly Offer-Westort 04:04
I had studied abroad when I was in high school. I was an exchange student in Thailand. And so, I think that I was really interested in like being able to explore the world more, to have more different experiences.

I can say that the research projects that I worked on with Doug were on diaspora populations that came to the United States. So, I did research studies on second, third, and fourth generation Welsh diaspora populations, people who had come from Wales and then worked in the Slate Valley of the U. S. in Vermont and New York, and the research questions that we asked were around how people retained their cultural practices or cultural signifiers.

And so, you would see a lot of people who are first generation diaspora immigrants, often less interested in retaining, obvious cultural signifiers of being from Wales, of engaging in Welsh practices, that they were much more interested in assimilation. Whereas second and third generation populations might be much more interested in say flying a Welsh flag, you know, or collecting Welsh recordings trying to relearn the language. And so I think at that point I was very interested in how kind of different people engaged in different communities and kind of global immigration practices.

I think that my sort of orientation towards research was very nascent at that point in time, and I was kind of much more interested in being able to explore and being able to travel. 

I was very fortunate to work with Doug and to get involved in doing research over the summers that I was at Grinnell. However, I will say that another student who worked with him a different summer, looking at Welsh diaspora populations lived at populations who went to Patagonia. And so that student got to travel to Patagonia over a summer. Whereas I traveled to upstate New York, which was a wonderful experience but slightly less exotic travel destination for me at the time.

Stephen 06:05
Yeah, I was going to ask and you said travel I mean, it's certainly love upstate New York, but that's too bad, you got the short straw there where did these interests lead you after college, ‘cause you did not go straight into a graduate program. Is that right?

Molly Offer-Westort 06:18
 No, I did not. So right after college, I did a postgraduate fellowship through Grinnell to teach in Lesotho. I taught at an all girls high school in Central Lesotho for a year. I taught English and guidance and counseling, and that had been set up by a professor at Grinnell College to send a student or two to that high school.

So I spent a year teaching in Lesotho, which was a really wonderful experience. It's a beautiful country and I was able to travel a lot in Southern Africa. And then I went to from that postgraduate fellowship to do the Peace Corps in Madagascar. I was in Madagascar for a couple of years. 

So that was along my path thinking about working in international development. I was getting some experience working abroad and in the Peace Corps I was an environment volunteer. So I worked on reforestation projects, on improved rice farming, and environmental education in the community that I was in Madagascar. 

I was thinking about going into working in international development. And so having spent time in the field and working with people, I think I got a much better understanding of how I might imagine some of those projects working. So as a Peace Corps volunteer, there are, I believe, three goals, and the first   two of them are, cultural and international exchange of the U.S. with other countries, of other countries with the U. S., and the third one is actually working on development projects. And I think that I realized pretty quickly into my Peace Corps experience, that I wasn't going to be able to make huge accomplishments in terms of advancing the community that I was living in.

I was working on rice farming, which was almost an embarrassing type of project to work on, that I was coming as this undergraduate who'd studied cultural anthropology to a community who had been rice farming for generations to introduce to them an improved approach to rice farming that was going to be more flood resistant. And people were super welcoming and super interested in engaging with me. But I think you quickly learn humility that the people that you're working with who are much better experts in the types of areas that you might be working in. 

So I had a really positive experience working with people and engaging with people in my community, but I think that I, you know, learned that I wasn't going to be some major agent of change individually, that I was going to benefit a lot from working collaboratively with people.

Stephen 08:42
As those experiences were unfolding, were you pretty sure that you wanted to come back to the States and study public policy at some point? Or like, how did that unfold? 

Molly Offer-Westort 08:49
Yeah, so that was the idea when I was in the Peace Corps, that I was going to come back and do a graduate degree in public policy. So I went to Princeton, the School for Public and International Affairs, after the Peace Corps. My plan had always been to come back and work in an international development organization, USAID, an NGO, something along those lines.

And I think my kind of transition towards thinking more about research really happened when I was in policy school. Princeton has different tracks and I came in to work in the international development track. But I transitioned while I was there to work on the economics and econometrics track. I started taking a lot more kind of quantitatively oriented coursework and realized that I really liked that type of coursework and I was potentially a lot more than many of my classmates that I really enjoyed it.

And so, I started taking classes that were beyond what was just kind of required to complete the track, but to kind of explore different types of quantitative courses. So that began kind of my transition to thinking about that I might want to work in the sort of economics of public policy. And so I looked specifically for a job after Princeton that I could work in that space for it. That's how I ended up working at the World Bank. 

I worked in the Development Impact Evaluation Initiative, which runs impact evaluations or large-scale experiments for World Bank oriented research. So, I was working as a field coordinator in that unit within the World Bank. So I went out and I was based in Senegal to kind of collect data, oversee research projects, but this was kind of my transition from thinking that I was going to be working just on the kind of aid and development side to thinking that I might work on the research side, I was just getting a taste of working in that unit.

The World Bank is a development bank. So they lend out money to different countries, uh, for development projects and they invest in development. projects. But they also have a research group where the aim of the research group within the Bank is to better understand the impacts of these type of projects, what type of projects might be most effective. 

And so, within their research group, they run impact evaluations. Since the idea of an impact evaluation is that it's a randomized control trial where they might try out different types of program implementations to see which one might be most effective. These types of randomized control trials where you randomly assign a community or an individual or a group of people to one type of intervention versus another type of intervention are really the gold standard for understanding the causal effect of different types of programs. And so the World Bank is really interested in understanding the causal effects of these types of programs because they'd like to invest in the programs that are most effective. 

So they have their own kind of development research group that works on that but they work with many academics, both outside and interior to the World Bank on designing those types of studies.

So when I was working at the World Bank, I was working on these large scale policy experiments that they would be conducting at potentially a national level. the types of experiments that I work on now are more digital experiments, understanding how people engage with information or engage with each other in online spaces.

So the location of the experiment is different, but the research design is often pretty similar that you might think of randomizing at the individual or the group level. And you're thinking about identifying and estimating causal effects of different types of interventions. And I'm still really interested in policy oriented questions where you might think about what should a government or a platform think about as an optimal policy for achieving certain types of objectives.

So the space that's happening in is potentially very different than those impact evaluations that I was first working on in Senegal, but the research design, I think, is really the through line. 

Stephen 12:49
That's interesting. And I mean, I would have to guess that a lot of those questions and a lot of the research into, you know, those digital spaces and platforms has evolved since you were probably like getting a master's or getting a PhD. I mean, like these are conversations that have really cropped up at least in the public eye relatively recently. 

Molly Offer-Westort 13:09
Oh, sure. It's, it's changed tremendously. And a lot of my work has been in Sub Saharan Africa and people's access to the internet has just like completely transformed during the time that I've been working in these spaces. So, my more recent projects have been in Kenya and Nigeria, working with people who are on Facebook.

And lots of people who might not have a home computer are still engaging on Facebook or Facebook Messenger on their phones. That having, basically computers in their hands has meant that people absolutely anywhere in the world are engaging in these online spaces and are engaging in online communities in ways that they weren't just several years ago.

Stephen 13:43
Can you tell me a little bit more about the, the questions that you're, looking in spaces like that? I mean, I guess like looking at your bio, I'm tempted to say like online misinformation, which is obviously something I've, we've all been hearing quite a bit for the last, whatever 8,10 years. Is that the right way of putting it? Like what are your kind of like specific inquiries? 

Molly Offer-Westort 14:06
So I have research on how people engage with information and misinformation online. I think I'm really interested in how people internalize information that they see in online spaces and then engage with and potentially share it and then how information gets transmitted through these communities. So I'm thinking not just about the problems of misinformation but also potentially if governments are trying to promote different types of government policies. 

So I have a study looking at vaccination programming in Kenya and Nigeria as the government was trying to encourage people to get vaccinated. What types of messaging might be most effective at encouraging people to engage with programming to go out and get vaccinated. You could think about this applying to lots of different types of programs that people might engage with. 

When thinking about information and misinformation and my research with Leah Rosenzweig, who's also at the University of Chicago, and Susan Athey at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, there is a connection between the types of information that people believe online and then whether they share that information, how they’re engage with it, but it's not necessarily a one to one connection. 

So there might be information or articles that people see online that they're not sure whether it's true or not, but they still share that information. And so as we're thinking about these online spaces and how to improve online information environments, what we want to do and think about in terms of interventions that platforms or other types of organizations might engage with is not just to get people to correctly be able to identify misinformation, but to really change their sharing behavior, right? 

So people repost things that they might think are not true, potentially because they think it's funny, it's interesting, they think people might engage with it. There are lots of different reasons that people might post or repost something without necessarily believing that it's true. But there are interventions that we can see that can improve people's ability, not just to identify misinformation, but their overall, sharing behavior, the types of information that they post can be more likely to be true or validated.

Stephen16:20
Also wanted to just ask, you know, about your kind of daily life, as a professor and like what your role looks like now. Are you teaching this semester?

Molly Offer-Westort 16:29
No, I'm not. I'm on sabbatical this year. 

Stephen 16:32
Oh, nice. Cool. What, what are you doing with that? 

Molly Offer-Westort 16:34
Right now I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona. I'm doing a lot of hiking, so I'm taking a little bit of time away to have some deeper thoughts into my research and then intersperse that with time out in nature.

Stephen 16:45
Awesome. As you take a little bit of time to step back, are there specific areas that you're hoping you can get into in the future or like projects that you have kind of like forming in your mind or just like other potential areas of exploration that you see coming down the road. 

Molly Offer-Westort 17:04
There are two areas of research that I'm really hoping to be able to invest in over the next year that I have some time away from teaching. And I really enjoy teaching and I think it's really intellectually beneficial for me to think about how to communicate topics to students. But it's also nice to get some time away from teaching because it does take a lot of energy and organization to just have some time where I can think about my research projects for several days on end. 

So the two kind of areas that I'm working in, one is on adaptive experimentation, which is an area that I've worked on before. The idea of adaptive experimentation is that as you're running an experiment or a randomized control trial, how you allocate different interventions or different policies to different people might be updated as you go through this study.

So you might be interested in, among several different interventions, which of them is the most effective for achieving some goal? And if that is your goal from this study, you might benefit from over assigning the interventions that appear to be most effective as you're conducting the study.

And decreasing assignment to the interventions that appear to be ineffective. So you're basically observing the data as it comes in. And if it looks like some of your interventions are kind of duds, you're going to spend less of your sample on those interventions and more on other types of interventions and get more data on them.

So you might have a couple of interventions that are really good. You're going to get a lot more data on those two compared to one that's performing poorly. So you can better tell amongst those two that are performing well, which one of them might be the best for your goal. So these are types of designs that have been used By social media companies, by internet companies, and that are used in the corporate space a lot of times.

I think they have a lot of potential applications in social and policy settings where we might care about which type of programming is most effective, which type of intervention is going to be most useful for achieving our goal. And we often care about the outcomes of people as we're conducting experiments, particularly, particularly in these social and policy settings, you really want to assign to people programs that are going to be beneficial for them, achieve good outcomes for them, and these types of designs can be more effective at that.

That said, there are some, adjustments that might be needed to these studies for statistical inference. So after the fact, as a researcher, as a social scientist, I'd like to use that data to get good estimates of response under the different types of interventions, to be able to compare the interventions to each other in a statistically rigorous way. 

And to do that most effectively, I might need to make tweaks to the type of algorithm that I'm using for assignment. And so I work on coming up with designs and statistical methodologies that are going to allow social scientists and policymakers to use these types of adaptive designs for the statistical inferential goals that might be most important to them.

So over the next year, I'm going to be working on that some more. I'll be working on conducting some online experiments but also working on putting together some tools and resources for social scientists and for policy makers who might like to use these types of designs. So that's one of my big areas that I'm working on. 

Stephen 20:20
Interesting that's an area where there are already major companies, like household names, I guess, that are like doing a lot of this testing and you mentioned also obvious policy implications to your work. I know you're not specifically researching like the U.S., you know, domestic political situation. Lucky you. 

But I also know that you're going to be involved in this upcoming, U.S. Presidential Election webinar series. Can you just say a little bit about like, what you can kind of bring to bear on that and like what some of the important like takeaways or like implications for the presidential election are going to be. 

Molly Offer-Westort 21:00
Yeah, absolutely. So the other area that I'm continuing to invest in and work on this year is continuing to try and understand how people engage with information and each other in online spaces. So I have some ongoing research with Isaac Melhoff, who was a postdoc at the University of Chicago and is now starting as an assistant professor at Texas A& M, looking at how people engage in conversations online with people who might have a different position than them.

And I think that there are a lot of aspects of online spaces that change how   people engage with other people, that change how people engage with information. And so what I'm hoping to continue to work on is to understand how those online spaces contribute to people's understanding of their worlds around them, contribute to potentially political polarization and to see what's specific to those types of online communications and conversations that might help us better understand our current political moment.

Something that I'm trying to work on better understanding is how people's media and information environments are very different in online spaces. We’ve seen this change dramatically in the United States, but I think globally as well, that people are able to select into information environments specific to their interests, which can be, you know, hugely beneficial that people are able to get very specialized information and in areas that might be very relevant to them.

But it also means that people potentially operate and just completely different versions of the world in terms of how they understand the world around them and as the election unfolds, I'm really interested in seeing in the United States basically how different communities understand different developments in different ways. 

Stephen 22:46
Well, yeah, we'll all be watching closely. Just to wrap up, taking into account the whole of what you do at UChicago, what would you say you find the most fulfilling about your work? 

Molly Offer-Westort 23:00
So I think that there are probably two things that this is probably going to be common to many of the people that you speak to. But I really love being able to just really go down rabbit holes with questions and this is probably the reason that many of us end up in academia, right? Is that you're able to really kind of dig into a question like a dog with a bone and just kind of like really follow up on it and spend a lot of time trying to think through these things. 

Whereas I think in some different types of careers, you might not get that same type of intellectual freedom or time to just really dig into things so much. So I'm really appreciating this sabbatical year that I have this space to kind of think more deeply about some of the research questions that I've been working on and to kind of dig into those things.

But then the other aspect of my work that's incredibly fulfilling is working with students, particularly graduate students, who are coming up with their own research agendas and that has been a really, and fulfilling aspect of the work that I get to do is to see people who are kind of developing their own research interests, developing their own research questions and coming at research questions from angles that I might not have ever thought of.

It's really hugely beneficial to me to get to work with graduate students and to see them develop in their own ways as researchers. 

Stephen 24:22
Thank you, Professor Offer-Westort, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.