New works published

I’ve done a poor job of announcing my publications recently, so here’s a quick summary of new work.

Today a paper led by a talented graduate student, Qin Li, was published in the Journal of Communication. We use a pair of panel studies collected by Rob Bond, Erik Nisbet, and me in 2019 and 2020 to assess when regional geographic difference might help to explain Americans’ ability to distinguish between political truths and falsehoods. We find that both battleground state status and state-level political homogeneity were influential in the election year. We take these results to indicate that the political and social communication contexts in which Americans’ live have a meaningful influence on their belief sensitivity.

Before that, Rob Bond and I had a paper published in PNAS Nexus which shed new light on the virality of true and false claims. Analyzing observation data collected on Reddit, we find that fact-checked posts that were found to be true elicit wider reaching, longer lasting conversations than posts found to be false. This is in stark contrast to other well known research on this topic using Twitter data, suggesting that the sociotechnical context matter when assessing virality.

Finally, back in January my accomplished (now former) graduate student, Dr. Shannon Poulsen, led a paper published in PLOS One examining whether Americans’ beliefs in false claims consistent with interpreting satire literally differ from their beliefs in false claims based on other types of misleading content. The evidence suggests that misperceptions based on satire are not as widespread as those based on other sources, but that there are systematic differences in who holds these two kinds of misperceptions. For example, Republicans are more likely to believe false claims with non-satiric origins than Democrats. And social media engagement is more strongly correlated with belief in satire than other types of misperceptions.

Abstracts and links to all the papers can be found on the papers section of this website.

Persuasive power of ideologically tailored science messages

Congratulations to Kate Luong on the publication of her lead-authored article in Science Communication. Kate is a talented graduate student and this paper nicely illustrates the rigor and thoughtfulness that she brings to all her work.

Luong, K. T., Garrett, R. K., & Slater, M. D. (in press). Promoting Persuasion with Ideologically Tailored Science Messages: A Novel Approach to Research on Emphasis Framing. Science Communication. doi:10.1177/1075547019862559

Motivated reasoning in response to disconfirming science information presents a challenging barrier to science communication. This paper presents a novel approach to emphasis framing, in which functionally equivalent information is framed using ideologically consistent values and tailored to the audiences. In contrast to traditional framing approaches, science information is held constant across frames and only interpretations of the information are varied. Results from an experiment provide initial support for this ideology-based framing approach. Persuasive effects are stronger for an ideologically congruent frame than an incongruent frame, and no boomerang effects were observed. We discuss implications and directions for future research.

Neo accepts Assistant Professor position at Hawaii

It gives me great pleasure to announce that my former advisee, Rachel Neo, has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  Rachel plans to continue her work on online bandwagon effects. She will also expand her research program to include cross-national comparative work on how digital media influence political expression and public engagement. Congratulations, Rachel!

Congratulations, Dr. Finn

A heartfelt congratulations to my advisee Elizabeth Finn, who this morning defended her dissertation, “Negatively Disinhibited Online Communication: The Role of Visual Anonymity and Public Self-Awareness”. Elizabeth’s work demonstrates that there is a lot about anonymity that scholars still do not understand, and it suggests a promising path for moving the field forward. Her experiments show that being visible does not always promote “good” behavior, and suggests that we need a more nuanced understanding of what it means to feel accountable online.

Neo defends dissertation

Congratulations to Rachel Neo on defending her dissertation yesterday. Rachel’s work provocatively argues that individuals do not always accept online ratings at face value. When evaluating contentious content, in this case fact checking messages, the influence of ratings is contingent on users’ perceptions of the community of raters, users’ confidence in his or her judgment heuristics, the type of rating used (stars or “likes”), and more. It’s an exciting avenue of research, I look forward to seeing where she takes it next.

Neo article published in IJPOR

Congratulations to my student Rachel Neo on the (electronic) publication of her sole-authored article, “Favoritism or Animosity? Examining How SNS Network Homogeneity Influences Vote Choice via Affective Mechanisms” in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. As the title suggests, the paper examines how online social network composition shapes citizens’ feelings toward political candidates, and how this impacts vote choice. The work uses data collected as part of my NSF award. The article is available for download here:

DOI: 10.1093/ijpor/edv035

AEJMC Pol Comm Best Published Paper Award

My colleagues and I are honored to have our 2014 HCR paper named the best paper in political communication by the Political Communication Interest Group of the AEJMC.  If you’re curious, you can download a copy here.

Garrett, R. K., Gvirsman, S. D., Johnson, B. K., Tsfati, Y., Neo, R., & Dal, A. (2014). Implications of Pro- and Counterattitudinal Information Exposure for Affective Polarization. Human Communication Research, 40(3), 309-332. doi: 10.1111/hcre.12028