Category Archives: Advisee News

Li win NCA dissertation award

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.

Congratulations to Dr. Cruz Ibarra

I’m delighted share that my PhD advisee, Dr. Jorge Cruz Ibarra, has successfully defended his dissertation and accepted a position as Lecturer in Communication at Stony Brook University.

Dr. Cruz Ibarra’s dissertation, Anger and Persuasion in Populist Political Communication: A Dual-Pathway Model, tackles a timely debate with a long history in communication research: does anger enhance or hinder the persuasiveness of populist messages? Through two experimental studies, he proposes a dual-pathway model that explains how anger can simultaneously motivate deeper engagement with messages while also triggering coping responses that reduce elaboration. His findings reveal that anger consistently boosts approach motivation, but its impact on persuasion varies depending on audience characteristics—especially political predispositions. This work offers a nuanced understanding of emotion-driven persuasion and opens new avenues for research in political communication.

Congratulations, Jorge!

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 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.