Current research projects

Making myself accountable to my non-existent blog readers:

• Public Myths: Through surveys and interviews, finding widely held misperceptions that are not a result of elite misinformation. This is the big project. Eventually, I’ll be running field experiments on correcting these myths in news outlets.
• News Format Choices: When and why do people turn to text versus video? Specifically, what roles do (1) the difficulty of the story and (2) the emotional resonance of the story play?
• Anxiety and News: We know a lot about why people read the news, but little about why they don’t. What leads people to opt out, either of entire news sources or of particular formats?
• How Factual Information is Integrated into Policy Preferences: This is the most poorly defined of my projects. This stems from my paper looking at the role of empathy in support for redistributive policies. We know that when people encounter facts that counter their existing beliefs, they often either dismiss the facts or–even if they accept them–fail use them to inform their policy preferences. How can information be presented in a way that minimizes this tendency?