Samuel Hardman Taylor studies interpersonal and psychological processes in social media, mobile phones, and other communication technologies. His research focuses on the implications of social media for personal relationships and psychological well-being. He is interested in human-computer interaction, emphasizing designing new technologies to support social connections, intimacy, and mental health. Sam also works with interdisciplinary teams to build new tools for social media analytics to advance social science research. 

Dr. Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago. Sam earned his PhD in Communication at Cornell University, working in the Cornell Social Media Lab. He is also affiliated with the UIC Psychology Department. Sam advises undergraduate and graduate students in the Chicago Social Media Lab and welcomes graduate students to apply to work with him. 

You can find his UIC contact information here. 

LONELY ALGORITHMS

Taylor & Chen (2024): Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Social media companies, such as TikTok, claim that their algorithms—the behind-the-scenes technology that recommends what posts/videos users see—are designed to facilitate social connection. But do these claims align with the experiences of social media users? Individuals in our study felt more connected to others when algorithmic personalization on TikTok reflected their sense of self, goals, interests, hobbies, etc. Feeling connected through algorithms appeared to be the byproduct of how users interact with and perceive the algorithm not just an algorithm’s code.

ALGORITHM RESPONSIVENESS

Taylor & Choi (2022): Social Media + Society

We developed a scale to measure people’s perceptions of social media algorithms, and find that TikTok is rated as more responsive to user’s identity and goals than Facebook or Instagram. Conversely, Facebook’s algorithm is more insensitivity to people’s identities than TikTok. The scale for the study is available here.

ALWAYS ONLINE, ALWAYS AVAILABLE 

Taylor & Bazarova (2021): Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

Being tethered to one another can give people a sense of security, while simultaneously causing more stress. In this article, we find that keeping a romantic partner constantly within a (digital) arm’s reach promotes better well-being for oneself. Being always available to a romantic partner via offline and online communication channels did not harm well-being. Rather, keeping a romantic partner always available also predicted better well-being for the romantic partner.

PARENTING THE TIKTOK ALGORITHM

Taylor & Brisini (2024): Computers in Human Behavior

Teens live in an algorithmically curated digital world, especially on the platform TikTok with the For You Feed. In this project, we position parental algorithm awareness as a critical digital parenting skill and seek to understanding how it influences parental mediation decisions. A survey of U.S. parents founds that algorithm awareness predicted more negative attitudes about algorithmic curation on TikTok because algorithm awareness predicted parents thinking about the risks of TikTok use more but not the opportunities. Negative attitudes about TikTok’s algorithm, in turn, predicted a greater likelihood of banning their teenager from using TikTok.

OPEN SCIENCE IN COMMUNICATION

Markowitz, Song, & Taylor (2021): Journal of Communication

This project reviews 10,000+ communication research papers to see how the field of communication is approaching the ongoing open science revolution. We found that 5.1% of papers published between 2010 and 2020 mentioned open science, and that mentions of open science was unrelated to number of citations but inversely related to the h-index of the publishing journal.