Author Archives: R. Kelly Garrett

Min Seon Jeong

Dr. Min Seon Jeong, who earned her PhD in 2021, has recently accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in communication at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College, where she previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In her new appointment, she will teach a variety of communication courses while continuing her research exploring the ways in which online media can shape individuals’ consumption and processing of political information. Congratulations, Min!

Qin Li

Dr. Qin Li defended her dissertation over the summer. It in, she proposed a new theoretical approach to understand how social network connections shape perceptions of false political claims. She argues that trust in a communication partner and network closure among communicators play pivotal roles in shaping beliefs and sharing intentions. She used an experimental paradigm derived from economic trust games to the theory. This is exciting work and I look forward to see where she takes it next.

Today, Qin is a Preparing Future Faculty for Inclusive Excellence (PFFIE) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri.

Student updates

This is a long-overdue update on my former students’ many successes. I can’t take credit for all the great things that these scholars and professionals are doing, but take pride in having helped them along their unique journeys.

I’m posting each item separately to make them easier to find, and I’ll start with the oldest news.

New work on information sharing

A team that I’m collaborating with has just published a new article in Scientific Reports that compares the influence of novelty to that of belief consistency on sharing. Using observational data collected on Twitter and a pair of experiments, we demonstrate that belief consistency tends to be the stronger predictor.

Here’s the abstract:

In the classical information theoretic framework, information “value” is proportional to how novel/surprising the information is. Recent work building on such notions claimed that false news spreads faster than truth online because false news is more novel and therefore surprising. However, another determinant of surprise, semantic meaning (e.g., information’s consistency or inconsistency with prior beliefs), should also influence value and sharing. Examining sharing behavior on Twitter, we observed separate relations of novelty and belief consistency with sharing. Though surprise could not be assessed in those studies, belief consistency should relate to less surprise, suggesting the relevance of semantic meaning beyond novelty. In two controlled experiments, belief-consistent (vs. belief-inconsistent) information was shared more despite consistent information being the least surprising. Manipulated novelty did not predict sharing or surprise. Thus, classical information theoretic predictions regarding perceived value and sharing would benefit from considering semantic meaning in contexts where people hold pre-existing beliefs.

Social Science One paper now out

A paper based on collaborative project using data provided by Social Science One is now available. We used news stories shared on Facebook to capture the publication practices of both high and low-credibility outlets and analyzed the subject matter of those stories. Results suggest that although the two news ecosystems exhibit similar patterns in terms of the volume of publications, there are striking differences in the subject matter. There’s a press release describing the work here and the article can be found here.

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.

NSF Convergence Accelerator

I’m delighted to announce that I am part of an interdisciplinary team that has received an NSF award as part of the Convergence Accelerator program.

Here’s the project abstract:

High volume, rapidly changing, diverse information, which often includes misinformation, can easily overwhelm decision makers during a crisis. Decisions made both during and long after a crisis, affect the trust between responsible decision makers and citizens (many from vulnerable populations), who are impacted by those decisions. This project seeks to help decision makers manage information, promoting reliance on authentic knowledge production processes while also reducing the impact of intentional disinformation and unintended misinformation. The project team will develop a suite of prototype tools that bring timely, high-quality integrated content to bear on decision making and governance, as a routine part of operations, and especially during a crisis. Integrated and authenticated content comprising scientific facts and technical information coupled with citizen and stakeholder viewpoints assure the accuracy of safety decisions and the appropriate prioritization of relief efforts. The project team will synthesize convergent expertise across multiple disciplines; engage and build stakeholder communities through partnerships with government and industry to guide tool development; build a prototype tool for authenticating data and managing misinformation; and validate the tool using real world crisis scenarios.

The project team will create use-inspired personalized AI-driven sensemaking prototype tools for decision-makers to comprehend and authenticate dynamic, uncertain, and often contradictory information to facilitate effective decisions during crises. The tools will focus on curation while accounting for source and explainable content credibility. Guidance from community stakeholders obtained using ethnographic methods will ensure that the resulting tools are practical, timely, and relevant for informed decision making. These tools will capitalize on features of the information environment, human cognitive abilities and limitations, and algorithmic approaches to managing information. In particular, content and network analyses can reveal constellations of sources with a higher probability of producing credible information, while knowledge graphs can help surface and organize important materials being shared while facilitating explainability. The project team will also design and develop a microworld environment to examine and improve tool robustness while simultaneously helping to train decision makers in real-world settings such as school districts and public health settings. This project represents a convergence of disciplines spanning expertise in computer science, social sciences, linguistics, network science, public health, cognitive science, operations, and communication that are necessary to achieve its goals. Partnerships between communities, government industry, and academia will ensure the deliverables are responsive to stakeholder needs.