It is such a joy to see your students excel! Qin Li (PhD., 2024) and Kara Fort (MA, 2023) were both acknowledged for their research awards at the 2025 NCA Political Communication business meeting.
Li & Fort receive awards at NCA
Category Archives: Awards
Receiving the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award
I’m deeply honored to have been selected to receive the Charles H. Woolbert Research Award from the National Communication Association. The Woolbert Award is given to scholars whose published research has stood the test of time, having significantly influenced the study and practice of communication over the past decade or more. To be included among the scholars and educators who have received this award is both humbling and inspiring.
The work being recognized reframed the debate around selective exposure to political information. In a media landscape defined by choice, this research introduced to political communication the idea that while people do prefer opinion-reinforcing content, they do not systematically avoid exposure to opposing views. This distinction matters: avoiding challenges to one’s beliefs is far more damaging to democratic discourse than simply seeking reinforcement. The findings of this paper, which were based on a national survey conducted before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, suggest that Americans use online media to deepen their engagement with like-minded perspectives without entirely closing themselves off to alternative viewpoints.
I’m proud that this research continues to contribute to our understanding of political communication and media effects. I look forward to formally accepting the award at the NCA’s 111th Annual Convention this November in Denver.
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.
Worcester Prize 2025
I am honored to be a coauthor on a paper, led by Dr. Jennifer Brundidge, that received the Robert M. Worcester Prize from the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). The Worcester Prize is presented by WAPOR on the annual basis for the year’s outstanding paper contributed to the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
Brundidge, J., & Garrett, R. K. (2024). The “Clinching Effect” and Affective Polarization: Exposure to Incivility via Social Media in the Presence of Online News. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 36(3), edae042. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edae042
Facebook funding
Erik Nisbet, Rob Bond, and I have received a grant from Facebook for about $50K to study misinformation in the 2020 election. Ours was one of 25 proposal funded out of a pool of more than 1,000 applications. The project focuses on quantifying the harms of misinformation during the election. The announcement is here: https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/08/announcing-the-winners-of-facebooks-request-for-proposals-on-misinformation-and-polarization/
Understanding Problematic Sharing Behavior on Facebook
A research team that I lead is one of 12 inaugural recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research grants from the Social Science Research Council and their partner Social Science One. The team includes Rob Bond (Ohio State University), Ceren Budak (University of Michigan), Jason Jones (Stony Brook University), and Drew Margolin (Cornell University).
The award provides unprecedented access to anonymous data from Facebook on the sharing of online content. These data will be used to examine a variety of behaviors that could be harm people’s understanding of science, politics and their community, notably including sharing inaccurate information.
A brief description of the project is here: https://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/view/social-media-and-democracy-research-grants/grantees/garrett/
Other grantees are listed here: https://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/view/social-media-and-democracy-research-grants/grantees/
And more details about the types of data to be analyzed are here: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/election-research-grants/
Research funded by Facebook
Rob Bond and I have received funded through Facebook’s Integrity Foundational Research program for our project, “Measuring and modeling susceptibility to misinformation on social media.” We’re conducting a six-month panel study examining changes in Americans’ beliefs about high-profile political claims–both true and false–shared on social media. Data collection begins soon!
New NSF award
I am pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation has funded our collaborative research project, “Measuring and Promoting the Quality of Online News Discussions” (grants IIS-1717965 and 1717688. The project is a joint effort between researchers at the University of Michigan’s School of Information (Paul Resnick and Ceren Budak) and the Ohio State University’s School of Communication. The research team also includes UMSI graduate student Sam Carton.
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
ICA paper award
My coauthors and I were honored to receive the Top Faculty Paper Award from the ICA Political Communication Division for our paper, “Why Do Partisan Audience Participate? Perceived Public Opinion as the Mediating Mechanism”. A revised version of the paper has now also been accepted for publication at Communication Research.
Dvir-Gvirsman, S., Garrett, R. K., & Tsfati, Y. (In Press). Why Do Partisan Audience Participate? Perceived Public Opinion as the Mediating Mechanism. Communication Research.