Heartfelt congratulations to Qin Li on receiving the NCA Political Communication Division’s Lynda Lee Kaid Outstanding Dissertation Award for her dissertation titled, “In People We Trust: How Trust and Network Closure Impact Factual Beliefs and Misinformation Sharing”. Qin completed her PhD in 2024 and was advised by Rob Bond and me.

Her work is notable for both its theoretical and methodological contributions.

In her dissertation, Qin explored how social connections influence what people believe and what they share with others, especially when it comes to facts and false information. She focuses on the idea that trust is key. When we hear something from someone we trust, we’re more likely to believe it and pass it along.  One factor that can increase trust is called network closure—which means two people are more likely to trust each other if they share a mutual friend. To test this, she used interactive experiments where participants played trust-based games with computer-generated partners (bots). These bots were designed to act either trustworthy or untrustworthy. Afterward, the bots shared factual information with the participants. 

Surprisingly, whether the bot was trustworthy or not didn’t seem to affect how participants responded to the information. However, the study did show that it’s possible to influence how much someone trusts another person by using these trust games. This opens up new questions: Maybe different types of trust affect how we process information in different ways. And maybe trust isn’t as central to belief and sharing as we thought.