Journal articleNature human behaviour · March 2026
Scientists provide important information to the public. Whether that information influences decision-making depends on trust. In the USA, gaps in trust in scientists have been stable for 50 years: women, Black people, rural residents, religious people, les ...
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Journal articlePolitical Behavior · January 1, 2026
Political ideologies help groups advance diverse sets of interests under common agendas. However, it is unclear how these groups maintain their norms regarding what it means to be a member in good standing in a dynamic information environment. Building on ...
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Journal articleAmerican Political Science Review · November 1, 2025
Information on social media is characterized by networked curation processes in which users select other users from whom to receive information, and those users in turn share information that promotes their identities and interests. We argue this allows fo ...
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Journal articleNature human behaviour · September 2025
Much of the research quantifying volume and spread of online misinformation measures the construct at the source level, identifying a set of specific unreliable domains that account for a relatively small share of news consumption. This source-level dichot ...
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Journal articlePolitical Analysis · July 1, 2025
Past work on closed-ended survey responses demonstrates that inferring stable political attitudes requires separating signal from noise in “top of the head” answers to researchers’ questions. We outline a corresponding theory of the open-ended response, in ...
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Journal articleJournal of Politics · July 1, 2025
Televised political commentary offers a prominent venue for elites to interact with one another, modeling political talk for large numbers of viewers. When do televised discussions between political pundits reproduce or mitigate gender inequality? Extendin ...
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Journal articlePNAS nexus · April 2025
As they evolve, social networks tend to form transitive triads more often than random chance and structural constraints would suggest. However, the mechanisms by which triads in these networks become transitive are largely unexplored. We leverage a ...
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Journal articlePerspectives on Politics · December 1, 2024
Gun ownership is a highly consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency. As a result, it is important to understand why people buy ...
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Journal articleJournal of Environmental Studies and Sciences · December 1, 2024
Opponents of climate policy proposals frequently ground their objections in terms of costs. However, it is unclear whether these objections are persuasive to individuals considering whether to support such programs. Not only do people have difficulties in ...
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Journal articlePolitical Research Quarterly · September 1, 2024
Legislative activity—whether votes or communications—is often represented in a single partisan or ideological dimension. But as lawmakers communicate in various venues (e.g., traditional, direct, or social media), the extent to which these estimates are in ...
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Journal articlePolitical Research Quarterly · September 1, 2024
The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work ...
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Journal articlePolitical Behavior · June 1, 2024
Patterns in candidate emergence affect who voters can choose from, and thus the quality of representative democracy. Despite extensive work considering factors that contribute to political ambition and factors that contribute to candidate emergence separat ...
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Journal articleNature · June 2024
The social media platforms of the twenty-first century have an enormous role in regulating speech in the USA and worldwide1. However, there has been little research on platform-wide interventions on speech2,3. Here we evaluate the eff ...
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Journal articlePolitical Behavior · March 1, 2024
Volunteer-based voter contact presents multiple potential principal-agent problems for political campaigns. Conflicting potential solutions to these principal-agent problems generate two opposing expectations about campaigns’ preferences for ideological ty ...
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Journal articleJournal of Race Ethnicity and Politics · March 1, 2024
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a flashpoint of elite political discord, yet how Americans actually perceive CRT is unclear. We theorize that Republican elites utilized a strong framing strategy to re-define CRT as an empty signifier representing bro ...
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Journal articlePublic Opinion Quarterly · January 1, 2024
Even amid the unprecedented public health challenges attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to vaccinating against the novel coronavirus has been both prevalent and politically contentious in American public life. In this paper, we theorize that ...
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Journal articlePublic Opinion Quarterly · January 1, 2024
In his foundational essay, Philip Converse (1964) alludes to a small class of political sophisticates who are influential in the social construction and diffusion of ideological belief systems. However, despite their importance to the nature of ideology in ...
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Journal articleJAMA health forum · September 2023
ImportanceThe COVID-19 pandemic has been notable for the widespread dissemination of misinformation regarding the virus and appropriate treatment.ObjectiveTo quantify the prevalence of non-evidence-based treatment for COVID-19 in the US a ...
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Journal articleJournal of affective disorders · August 2023
BackgroundWe aimed to characterize the prevalence of social disconnection and thoughts of suicide among older adults in the United States, and examine the association between them in a large naturalistic study.MethodsWe analyzed data from ...
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Journal articleNature · June 2023
If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues such as rising political polarization1,2. This concern is central to the 'echo chamber'3-5
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Journal articlePNAS nexus · May 2023
Public health requires collective action-the public best addresses health crises when individuals engage in prosocial behaviors. Failure to do so can have dire societal and economic consequences. This was made clear by the disjointed, politicized response ...
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Journal articleBritish Journal of Political Science · April 24, 2023
Politics and science have become increasingly intertwined. Salient scientific issues, such as climate change, evolution, and stem-cell research, become politicized, pitting partisans against one another. This creates a challenge of how to effectively commu ...
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Journal articleApplied Cognitive Psychology · March 1, 2023
Conspiratorial beliefs can endanger individuals and societies by increasing the likelihood of harmful behaviors such as the flouting of public health guidelines. While scholars have identified various correlates of conspiracy beliefs, one factor that has r ...
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Journal articleJAMA network open · October 2022
ImportancePersistence of COVID-19 symptoms beyond 2 months, or long COVID, is increasingly recognized as a common sequela of acute infection.ObjectivesTo estimate the prevalence of and sociodemographic factors associated with long COVID a ...
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Journal articleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2022
Following the 2020 general election, Republican elected officials, including then-President Donald Trump, promoted conspiracy theories claiming that Joe Biden's close victory in Georgia was fraudulent. Such conspiratorial claims could implicate participati ...
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Journal articlePLOS digital health · June 2022
With a dataset of testing and case counts from over 1,400 institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the United States, we analyze the number of infections and deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the counties surrounding these IHEs during the Fall 2020 semester (Aug ...
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Journal articleJAMA network open · March 2022
ImportanceBoth major depression and firearm ownership are associated with an increased risk for death by suicide in the United States, but the extent of overlap among these major risk factors is not well characterized.ObjectiveTo assess t ...
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Journal articlePublic Opinion Quarterly · January 1, 2022
Primary voters frequently support the candidates they think have a greater chance of winning the general election over the candidates who most closely reflect their policy preferences-a perception referred to as "electability."While electability is typical ...
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Journal articleJAMA network open · January 2022
ImportanceMisinformation about COVID-19 vaccination may contribute substantially to vaccine hesitancy and resistance.ObjectiveTo determine if depressive symptoms are associated with greater likelihood of believing vaccine-related misinfor ...
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Journal articleJAMA network open · November 2021
ImportanceSome studies suggest that social media use is associated with risk for depression, particularly among children and young adults.ObjectiveTo characterize the association between self-reported use of individual social media platfo ...
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Journal articleDepression and anxiety · October 2021
IntroductionThe major stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic provide an opportunity to understand the extent to which protective factors against depression may exhibit gender-specificity.MethodThis study examined responses from m ...
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Journal articlePolitical Research Quarterly · December 1, 2020
More women ran for office in 2018 than any previous election year. This represents progress toward parity, but it remains unclear whether this surge in women’s political ambition signals an easing of the candidate emergence path, which has typically favore ...
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Journal articleElectoral Studies · October 1, 2020
Much of the political science literature is skeptical that issue content matters for presidential voting behavior, with partisanship, social identity, and group attitudes providing the vast majority of explanatory power for two-party vote choice at the ind ...
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Journal articleScience advances · July 2020
Cues sent by political elites are known to influence public attitudes and behavior. Polarization in elite rhetoric may hinder effective responses to public health crises, when accurate information and rapid behavioral change can save lives. We examine pola ...
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Journal articlePerspectives on Politics · March 1, 2020
In the original published article by Green and McElwee (2019), on page 362 the authors designated the wrong quartiles in explaining figures 3 and 4. The corrected text is provided here: Examining local economic conditions, starting with county-level percen ...
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Journal articlePerspectives on Politics · January 1, 2019
Debates over the extent to which racial attitudes and economic distress explain voting behavior in the 2016 election have tended to be limited in scope, focusing on the extent to which each factor explains white voters’ two-party vote choice. This limited ...
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