Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1839585 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philipp Lorenz-Spreen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philipp |
| FAMILY NAME | Lorenz-Spreen |
| SIGNATURE | LORENZ-SPREEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Human Development |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6319-4154 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Diverging associations of traditional versus social media with government trust
Trust in government and institutions is a cornerstone of functioning representative democracies. While previous research documented negative associations between social media use as a news source and institutional trust, temporal dynamics and even basic moderating factors remain underexplored. We aim to contribute evidence on these issues by asking: How is the media use-trust association shaped by moderators like traditional media use, age and pa…
The evolution of online news headlines
As the written word has moved online, new technological affordances and pressures – such as accelerated cycles of production and consumption – have changed how news headlines are produced and selected. Previous literature has linked certain strategies (e.g., clickbait) and linguistic features (e.g., length, negativity) to the success of text online (e.g., clicks). We tracked changes in the prevalence of those features in a sample of ca. 40 millio…
DeGroot-Based Opinion Formation Under a Global Steering Mechanism
This article investigates how interacting agents arrive to a consensus or a polarized state. We study the opinion formation process under the effect of a global steering mechanism (GSM), which aggregates the opinion-driven stochastic agent states at the network level and feeds back to them a form of global information. We also propose a new two-layer agent-based opinion formation model, called GSM-DeGroot , that captures the coupled dynamics betw…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Research can help to tackle AI-generated disinformation
The Importance of Informative Interventions in a Wicked Environment
Lewis Thomas (1983), in his medical history treatise, describes the case of an early 20th-century physician who was eerily accurate in diagnosing typhoid fever in his patients. Only much later did people realize that the physician himself “was a more effective carrier . . . than Typhoid Mary” (p. 22), because he was examining his patients using only his bare hands, transmitting the disease to everyone he touched. In this story, the complex enviro…
A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy
One of today’s most controversial and consequential issues is whether the global uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence ( N = 496 articles) on the link between digital media use and different political variables. Some associations, such as increasing political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy an…
Public attitudes towards algorithmic personalization and use of personal data online
People rely on data-driven AI technologies nearly every time they go online, whether they are shopping, scrolling through news feeds, or looking for entertainment. Yet despite their ubiquity, personalization algorithms and the associated large-scale collection of personal data have largely escaped public scrutiny. Policy makers who wish to introduce regulations that respect people’s attitudes towards privacy and algorithmic personalization on the…
How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online
Accelerating dynamics of collective attention
With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is dissemi…
Accelerating dynamics of collective attention
With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is dissemi…
How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online
Public attitudes towards algorithmic personalization and use of personal data online
People rely on data-driven AI technologies nearly every time they go online, whether they are shopping, scrolling through news feeds, or looking for entertainment. Yet despite their ubiquity, personalization algorithms and the associated large-scale collection of personal data have largely escaped public scrutiny. Policy makers who wish to introduce regulations that respect people’s attitudes towards privacy and algorithmic personalization on the…
The Importance of Informative Interventions in a Wicked Environment
Lewis Thomas (1983), in his medical history treatise, describes the case of an early 20th-century physician who was eerily accurate in diagnosing typhoid fever in his patients. Only much later did people realize that the physician himself “was a more effective carrier . . . than Typhoid Mary” (p. 22), because he was examining his patients using only his bare hands, transmitting the disease to everyone he touched. In this story, the complex enviro…
A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy
One of today’s most controversial and consequential issues is whether the global uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence ( N = 496 articles) on the link between digital media use and different political variables. Some associations, such as increasing political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy an…
Research can help to tackle AI-generated disinformation
DeGroot-Based Opinion Formation Under a Global Steering Mechanism
This article investigates how interacting agents arrive to a consensus or a polarized state. We study the opinion formation process under the effect of a global steering mechanism (GSM), which aggregates the opinion-driven stochastic agent states at the network level and feeds back to them a form of global information. We also propose a new two-layer agent-based opinion formation model, called GSM-DeGroot , that captures the coupled dynamics betw…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
The evolution of online news headlines
As the written word has moved online, new technological affordances and pressures – such as accelerated cycles of production and consumption – have changed how news headlines are produced and selected. Previous literature has linked certain strategies (e.g., clickbait) and linguistic features (e.g., length, negativity) to the success of text online (e.g., clicks). We tracked changes in the prevalence of those features in a sample of ca. 40 millio…
Diverging associations of traditional versus social media with government trust
Trust in government and institutions is a cornerstone of functioning representative democracies. While previous research documented negative associations between social media use as a news source and institutional trust, temporal dynamics and even basic moderating factors remain underexplored. We aim to contribute evidence on these issues by asking: How is the media use-trust association shaped by moderators like traditional media use, age and pa…
Computer Science (7 works) · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence (6 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (5 works) · Social Media and Politics (5 works) · Internet privacy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Social media (4 works) · Computer security (3 works) · Law (3 works)