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.

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.