Messing
Biographic Data
| ID | 1733 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Messing |
| FAMILY NAME | Messing |
| SIGNATURE | MESSING |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0109-4040 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 364 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Aoir Ethics in Action: Guidelines, Regulations, and Practices Across Diverse Global Communities
Since its inception, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and Internet-facilitated communication and interactions. The AoIR Ethics Working Committee has been committed to ensuring the AoIR Ethics Guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees; our goal is to support ethical decision-making in internet research by ke…
Web scraping for research: Legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific considerations
Scientists across disciplines often use data from the internet to conduct research, generating valuable insights about human behavior. However, as generative artificial intelligence relying on massive text corpora becomes increasingly valuable, platforms have greatly restricted access to data through official channels. As a result, researchers will likely engage in more web scraping to collect data, introducing new challenges and concerns for res…
Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narrati…
A 2 million-person, campaign-wide field experiment shows how digital advertising affects voter turnout
Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horse-race coverage of elections in the United States—shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that emphasize candidates’ chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election’s outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Fur…
Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and the Effects of Heterogeneous Treatments with Ensemble Methods
Randomized experiments are increasingly used to study political phenomena because they can credibly estimate the average effect of a treatment on a population of interest. But political scientists are often interested in how effects vary across subpopulations—heterogeneous treatment effects—and how differences in the content of the treatment affects responses—the response to heterogeneous treatments. Several new methods have been introduced to es…
Bias in the Flesh: Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns
There is strong evidence linking skin complexion to negative stereotypes and adverse real-world outcomes. We extend these findings to political ad campaigns, in which skin complexion can be easily manipulated in ways that are difficult to detect. Devising a method to measure how dark a candidate appears in an image, this paper examines how complexion varied with ad content during the 2008 presidential election campaign (study 1). Findings show th…
Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
Not getting all sides of the news? People are increasingly turning away from mass media to social media as a way of learning news and civic information. Bakshy et al. examined the news that millions of Facebook users' peers shared, what information these users were presented with, and what they ultimately consumed (see the Perspective by Lazer). Friends shared substantially less cross-cutting news from sources aligned with an opposing ideology. P…
Quantifying Social Media's Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens' endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric…
Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media: Endorsements Trump Partisan Source Affiliation When Selecting News Online
Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building o…
Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants
Journal Article Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants? A Cross-National Test of the Person-Positivity Bias Get access Shanto Iyengar, Shanto Iyengar * Shanto Iyengar is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Simon Jackman is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Solomon Messing is a PhD c…
Who is a ‘Deserving’ Immigrant? An Experimental Study of Norwegian Attitudes
Previous research demonstrates that opposition to immigration increases when immigrant groups are seen as economically non‐viable and burdened with distinctive and unassimilable cultural practices. However, no research to date has investigated the parallel relationship between attributes of individuals and willingness to admit these individuals as legal immigrants. This study examines Norwegians’ evaluations of individual immigrants. Using an exp…
How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation
Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit in this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators' credit claiming messages-and not just money spent in the district-affect how constituents allocat…
How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation
Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit in this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators' credit claiming messages-and not just money spent in the district-affect how constituents allocat…
Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants
Journal Article Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants? A Cross-National Test of the Person-Positivity Bias Get access Shanto Iyengar, Shanto Iyengar * Shanto Iyengar is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Simon Jackman is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Solomon Messing is a PhD c…
Quantifying Social Media's Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens' endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric…
Who is a ‘Deserving’ Immigrant? An Experimental Study of Norwegian Attitudes
Previous research demonstrates that opposition to immigration increases when immigrant groups are seen as economically non‐viable and burdened with distinctive and unassimilable cultural practices. However, no research to date has investigated the parallel relationship between attributes of individuals and willingness to admit these individuals as legal immigrants. This study examines Norwegians’ evaluations of individual immigrants. Using an exp…
Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and the Effects of Heterogeneous Treatments with Ensemble Methods
Randomized experiments are increasingly used to study political phenomena because they can credibly estimate the average effect of a treatment on a population of interest. But political scientists are often interested in how effects vary across subpopulations—heterogeneous treatment effects—and how differences in the content of the treatment affects responses—the response to heterogeneous treatments. Several new methods have been introduced to es…
Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horse-race coverage of elections in the United States—shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that emphasize candidates’ chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election’s outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Fur…
Bias in the Flesh: Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns
There is strong evidence linking skin complexion to negative stereotypes and adverse real-world outcomes. We extend these findings to political ad campaigns, in which skin complexion can be easily manipulated in ways that are difficult to detect. Devising a method to measure how dark a candidate appears in an image, this paper examines how complexion varied with ad content during the 2008 presidential election campaign (study 1). Findings show th…
A 2 million-person, campaign-wide field experiment shows how digital advertising affects voter turnout
Who is a ‘Deserving’ Immigrant? An Experimental Study of Norwegian Attitudes
Previous research demonstrates that opposition to immigration increases when immigrant groups are seen as economically non‐viable and burdened with distinctive and unassimilable cultural practices. However, no research to date has investigated the parallel relationship between attributes of individuals and willingness to admit these individuals as legal immigrants. This study examines Norwegians’ evaluations of individual immigrants. Using an exp…
How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation
Particularistic spending, a large literature argues, builds support for incumbents. This literature equates money spent in the district with the credit constituents allocate. Yet, constituents lack the necessary information and motivation to allocate credit in this way. We use extensive observational and experimental evidence to show how legislators' credit claiming messages-and not just money spent in the district-affect how constituents allocat…
Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants
Journal Article Do Attitudes about Immigration Predict Willingness to Admit Individual Immigrants? A Cross-National Test of the Person-Positivity Bias Get access Shanto Iyengar, Shanto Iyengar * Shanto Iyengar is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Simon Jackman is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Solomon Messing is a PhD c…
Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media: Endorsements Trump Partisan Source Affiliation When Selecting News Online
Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building o…
Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
Not getting all sides of the news? People are increasingly turning away from mass media to social media as a way of learning news and civic information. Bakshy et al. examined the news that millions of Facebook users' peers shared, what information these users were presented with, and what they ultimately consumed (see the Perspective by Lazer). Friends shared substantially less cross-cutting news from sources aligned with an opposing ideology. P…
Quantifying Social Media's Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens' endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric…
Bias in the Flesh: Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns
There is strong evidence linking skin complexion to negative stereotypes and adverse real-world outcomes. We extend these findings to political ad campaigns, in which skin complexion can be easily manipulated in ways that are difficult to detect. Devising a method to measure how dark a candidate appears in an image, this paper examines how complexion varied with ad content during the 2008 presidential election campaign (study 1). Findings show th…
Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and the Effects of Heterogeneous Treatments with Ensemble Methods
Randomized experiments are increasingly used to study political phenomena because they can credibly estimate the average effect of a treatment on a population of interest. But political scientists are often interested in how effects vary across subpopulations—heterogeneous treatment effects—and how differences in the content of the treatment affects responses—the response to heterogeneous treatments. Several new methods have been introduced to es…
Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public
Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horse-race coverage of elections in the United States—shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that emphasize candidates’ chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election’s outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Fur…
A 2 million-person, campaign-wide field experiment shows how digital advertising affects voter turnout
Web scraping for research: Legal, ethical, institutional, and scientific considerations
Scientists across disciplines often use data from the internet to conduct research, generating valuable insights about human behavior. However, as generative artificial intelligence relying on massive text corpora becomes increasingly valuable, platforms have greatly restricted access to data through official channels. As a result, researchers will likely engage in more web scraping to collect data, introducing new challenges and concerns for res…
Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups shape media discourse, to the spread of policy across institutions, to the diffusion of organizational structures and institution themselves. To study how ideas and narratives diffuse across text, we must first develop a method to identify whether texts share the same information and narrati…
Aoir Ethics in Action: Guidelines, Regulations, and Practices Across Diverse Global Communities
Since its inception, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has fostered critical reflection on the ethical and social dimensions of the internet and Internet-facilitated communication and interactions. The AoIR Ethics Working Committee has been committed to ensuring the AoIR Ethics Guidelines remain helpful and relevant to researchers and ethical review committees; our goal is to support ethical decision-making in internet research by ke…
Political science (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Media Influence and Politics (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works)