Erik C Nisbet
Biographic Data
| ID | 322745 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erik C Nisbet |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erik C |
| FAMILY NAME | Nisbet |
| SIGNATURE | NISBET E C |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7030-6361 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 392 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Reintegrating Influencer Media Logic into the Study of Political Influencers
Political influencers are an emerging epistemic authority in politics. Yet, existing scholarship risks conceptually misspecifying them by focusing on their political nature and neglecting their communicative practices established in broader social media influencer literature. This article advances a theoretical intervention to reintegrate influencer studies into the study of political influencers in political communication. Drawing on the media l…
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages
The Presumed Prevalence/Persuasiveness of Online Misinformation and Americans’ Dissatisfaction With Democracy
American public discourse about online misinformation often exaggerates its prevalence and persuasiveness, potentially harming Americans’ evaluations of democratic governance. This project uses two studies conducted during the 2020 and 2022 elections to test whether the presumed prevalence/persuasiveness of online misinformation (P3OM)—the perception that online misinformation is both widespread and persuasive—undermines Americans’ satisfaction w…
Benefit Seekers or Principle Holders? Experimental Evidence on Americans’ Democratic Trade-Offs
This study examines how Americans conceptualize democracy and whether their support for democratic principles remains consistent across different trade-offs. Using a conjoint experiment, we test whether citizens act as principle holders—maintaining support for democratic norms regardless of circumstances—or benefit seekers who prioritize material outcomes over liberal democratic norms. Our findings reveal that while respondents generally prefer d…
Self-Reported Exposure and Beliefs About Misinformation Across a U.S. Presidential Election Cycle
Psychometric Properties of the Nature Relatedness Scale (Nrs) in the Italian Context
Objectives. Nature Relatedness encompasses affective, cognitive, and experiential aspects of individuals’ connection with nature and refers to the appreciation and understanding of our interconnectedness with all other living things on Earth. This study aims to validate the Nature Relatedness Scale (NRS) in its Italian version, adapting and testing its reliability and validity in the Italian cultural context. A secondary objective is to analyze a…
To Share or Not to Share? How Emotional Judgments Drive Online Political Expression in High-Risk Contexts
Previous scholarship on networked authoritarianism has examined an array of repressive legal and political strategies employed by regimes to constrain online political expression. How the tension between citizens’ desires to engage in online political expression and the possible dire consequences of doing so is resolved, however, is understudied. We address this lacuna by drawing upon concepts from risk and decision-making research and examining …
Signaling silence
Networked authoritarian governments’ use of digital repression creates uncertainty and amplifies risk signals for ordinary citizens using social media for political expression. Employing theoretical frameworks from the risk and decision-making literature, we experimentally examine how citizens perceive and respond to the risks of low-effort forms of online activism in an authoritarian context. Our online field experiment demonstrates that emotion…
Walking Through Firewalls
The early hopes of the internet as a technology of 'liberation' have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even the most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication ex…
Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in Covid-19 Misinformation
The COVID-19 pandemic has been paired with a global misinformation “infodemic.” Citizens in authoritarian countries, where most media is state controlled, often do not have access to credible information sources to help combat misinformation. In fact, the news media in these countries may be the primary drivers of misinformation while digital media may be sources of more accurate information. We test how news and digital media in an authoritarian…
The Psychology of State-Sponsored Disinformation Campaigns and Implications for Public Diplomacy
Policy discourse about disinformation focuses heavily on the technological dimensions of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on technology has led to insufficient attention being paid to the underlying human factors driving the success of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Academic research on disinformation strongly suggests that belief in false or misleading information is driven more by individual …
"Fake news" and the defection of 2012 Obama voters in the 2016 presidential election
Climate change, cultural cognition, and media effects
According to cultural cognition theory, individuals hold opinions about politically contested issues like climate change that are consistent with their “cultural way of life,” conforming their opinions to how they think society should be organized and to what they perceive are the attitudes of their cultural peers. Yet despite dozens of cultural cognition studies, none have directly examined the role of the news media in facilitating these differ…
What Drives Media Use in Authoritarian Regimes? Extending Selective Exposure Theory to Iran
Most work on selective exposure comes from the United States or other western democracies and typically examines partisan attitudes as the cognitive or motivational drivers of selectivity. This study extends the boundary conditions of existing literature by studying the factors affecting media choice in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a drastically understudied context. Within the overarching framework of motivated reasoning, we propose two theoret…
A Psychological Firewall? Risk Perceptions and Public Support for Online Censorship in Russia
Objective Authoritarian regimes commonly justify Internet censorship by framing the Internet as a threat to their citizens that must be tightly controlled for their own protection. This threat rhetoric underpins government censorship and creates a “psychological firewall” driving public support for a censored Internet. Methods Based on risk and decision‐making scholarship, we evaluate how mass media and partisan regime support promulgate these th…
Maybe Yes, Maybe No?”
This article uses a national online survey to examine whether political ideology moderates the indirect relationship of conservative and nonconservative media use through intra-attitudinal consistency (i.e., ambivalence) and strength of policy position (i.e., how strongly people support or oppose mitigation policies) on intention to take political action regarding the issue of climate change. Results show that conservative media use increases int…
Priming the Costs of Conflict? Russian Public Opinion About the 2014 Crimean Conflict
Many have argued that the 2014 Russia–Crimea conflict was inflamed by Russia’s hawkish media propaganda, such that it drove Russian public opinion to support Crimea’s annexation, proving consequential for the state’s foreign policy. This study draws on audience costs and the democratic peace literature to contend that media coverage that highlights the diplomatic, military, and economic costs of conflict may reduce hawkish attitudes among the pub…
Green Narratives
This study examined the relationships between narrative involvement, affect, risk perceptions, and environmental policy preferences. Experiment 1 involved a 3 (news, documentary, entertainment) × 2 (hydraulic fracturing, genetically modified organisms) mixed between- and within-subjects experiment. Results indicated a serial mediation model in which narrative involvement increased the likelihood of a negative affective response, in turn increasin…
Ignorance or bias? Evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change
Does the relationship between media use and learning about climate change depend more on audiences’ scientific literacy on their ideological biases? To answer this question, we evaluate both the knowledge gap and belief gap hypotheses as they relate to climate change. Results indicate belief gaps for news and entertainment content and a knowledge gap for edutainment content. Climate change knowledge among conservatives decreased with greater atte…
The Partisan Brain
There has been deepening concern about political polarization in public attitudes toward the scientific community. The "intrinsic thesis" attributes this polarization to psychological deficiencies among conservatives as compared to liberals. The "contextual thesis" makes no such claims about inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, but rather points to interacting institutional and psychological factors as the forces…
What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy? Deconstructing Internet Penetration and Citizen Attitudes About Governance
Recent world events have highlighted the democratic potential of information and communication technologies. This article draws upon the democracy literature to develop a multilevel conceptual framework that links country-level Internet penetration and individual-level Internet use to citizen attitudes about governance in 34 developing countries. In doing so, it deconstructs "Internet penetration" into three dimensions—hardware (e.g., computers),…
Attitude Change in Competitive Framing Environments? Open-/Closed-Mindedness, Framing Effects, and Climate Change
Framing scholarship on policy issues has primarily focused on how competitive message environments alter framing effects or how individual differences moderate the impact of frames. This study combines both of these focal areas by examining how individual open-/closed-mindedness moderates framing effects about climate change within competitive and noncompetitive framing contexts. Contrary to previous scholarship, our experimental study finds effe…
Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media-Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naïve Theory
Media-based fact checking contributes to more accurate political knowledge, but its corrective effects are limited. We argue that biographical information included in a corrective message, which is often unrelated to the inaccurate claim itself, can activate misperception-congruent naïve theories, increasing confidence in a misperception's plausibility and inducing skepticism toward denials. Resistance to corrections occurs regardless of initial …
Internet Use and Democratic Demands
The success of a democracy depends, in part, on public demand for democratic institutions. How does Internet use shape citizens' preferences for regime type? Combining individual public opinion data from Africa and Asia with country-level indices, we test a multilevel model examining the relationship between Internet penetration, individual Internet use, and citizen demand for democracy across 28 countries. We find that Internet use, but not nati…
Mediated public diplomacy
Using Entman’s work on mediated public diplomacy, the authors conducted an Arabic-language online survey of news consumers on Arab websites, including one US-funded media outlet. They examined factors leading to gaps in exposure and perceptions of credibility for three Arab news outlets. Specifically, they examined variables that differentiated between exposure to and perceived credibility regarding the three satellite news media – al-Jazeera, al…
Social Structure and Citizenship
In this study, we develop a model of the interplay between sociostructural determinants of an individual's discussion behavior, such as the setting of primary discussion networks (work, church, and volunteer groups) and the nature of discussion (i.e., level of exposure to non-like-minded ideas), and individual-level outcomes, such as hard news media use, political knowledge, and participation in political processes. In doing so, we synthesize man…
The Partisan Brain
There has been deepening concern about political polarization in public attitudes toward the scientific community. The "intrinsic thesis" attributes this polarization to psychological deficiencies among conservatives as compared to liberals. The "contextual thesis" makes no such claims about inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, but rather points to interacting institutional and psychological factors as the forces…
What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy? Deconstructing Internet Penetration and Citizen Attitudes About Governance
Recent world events have highlighted the democratic potential of information and communication technologies. This article draws upon the democracy literature to develop a multilevel conceptual framework that links country-level Internet penetration and individual-level Internet use to citizen attitudes about governance in 34 developing countries. In doing so, it deconstructs "Internet penetration" into three dimensions—hardware (e.g., computers),…
"Fake news" and the defection of 2012 Obama voters in the 2016 presidential election
Public Diplomacy, Television News, and Muslim Opinion
Scholars agree that extreme anti-American sentiment is pervasive across the predominantly Muslim countries of the world, but disagree about the sources of these negative perceptions. Some researchers point to cultural, religious, and value divisions as primary factors shaping negative perceptions of the United States, while others emphasize internal Muslim state politics, comparatively low levels of economic and social development, and failure to…
Challenging the State
Several scholars have linked the growth of transnational Arab TV in the Middle East over the past decade to a rise in transnational Muslim and Arab political identification at the expense of national political identity. However, a theoretical context for understanding how media exposure may influence political identification in the Middle East at an individual level of analysis has been lacking, and to date very little quantitative evidence has b…
Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy
Journal Article Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy Get access Erik C. Nisbet Erik C. Nisbet Erik C. Nisbet is an assistant professor of strategic communication in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. His primary research interests are comparative political communication, opinion formation, and political behavior. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google …
Who's Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications
Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed an…
What Drives Media Use in Authoritarian Regimes? Extending Selective Exposure Theory to Iran
Most work on selective exposure comes from the United States or other western democracies and typically examines partisan attitudes as the cognitive or motivational drivers of selectivity. This study extends the boundary conditions of existing literature by studying the factors affecting media choice in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a drastically understudied context. Within the overarching framework of motivated reasoning, we propose two theoret…
Green Narratives
This study examined the relationships between narrative involvement, affect, risk perceptions, and environmental policy preferences. Experiment 1 involved a 3 (news, documentary, entertainment) × 2 (hydraulic fracturing, genetically modified organisms) mixed between- and within-subjects experiment. Results indicated a serial mediation model in which narrative involvement increased the likelihood of a negative affective response, in turn increasin…
Mediated public diplomacy
Using Entman’s work on mediated public diplomacy, the authors conducted an Arabic-language online survey of news consumers on Arab websites, including one US-funded media outlet. They examined factors leading to gaps in exposure and perceptions of credibility for three Arab news outlets. Specifically, they examined variables that differentiated between exposure to and perceived credibility regarding the three satellite news media – al-Jazeera, al…
A Psychological Firewall? Risk Perceptions and Public Support for Online Censorship in Russia
Objective Authoritarian regimes commonly justify Internet censorship by framing the Internet as a threat to their citizens that must be tightly controlled for their own protection. This threat rhetoric underpins government censorship and creates a “psychological firewall” driving public support for a censored Internet. Methods Based on risk and decision‐making scholarship, we evaluate how mass media and partisan regime support promulgate these th…
The Engagement Model of Opinion Leadership
Explicating and measuring opinion leadership continues to be an important theoretical topic, as personal influence and interpersonal discussion are widely recognized as shaping public opinion and political behavior. However, the concept of opinion leadership arose out of empirical research conducted primarily within the USA. Whether it may be applied to other national contexts remains to be fully explicated. Furthermore, media information-seeking…
The Psychology of State-Sponsored Disinformation Campaigns and Implications for Public Diplomacy
Policy discourse about disinformation focuses heavily on the technological dimensions of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on technology has led to insufficient attention being paid to the underlying human factors driving the success of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Academic research on disinformation strongly suggests that belief in false or misleading information is driven more by individual …
Environmental Values and the Social Amplification of Risk
As human interaction with wildlife increases due to population growth and development, wildlife managers and risk professionals have increasingly recognized the importance of citizen participation in risk management decision making. Employing a general population telephone survey of upstate New York residents and using a structural equation model analysis, this study examines the roles that environmental values and media use play in promoting pub…
Priming the Costs of Conflict? Russian Public Opinion About the 2014 Crimean Conflict
Many have argued that the 2014 Russia–Crimea conflict was inflamed by Russia’s hawkish media propaganda, such that it drove Russian public opinion to support Crimea’s annexation, proving consequential for the state’s foreign policy. This study draws on audience costs and the democratic peace literature to contend that media coverage that highlights the diplomatic, military, and economic costs of conflict may reduce hawkish attitudes among the pub…
Russian News Media, Digital Media, Informational Learned Helplessness, and Belief in Covid-19 Misinformation
The COVID-19 pandemic has been paired with a global misinformation “infodemic.” Citizens in authoritarian countries, where most media is state controlled, often do not have access to credible information sources to help combat misinformation. In fact, the news media in these countries may be the primary drivers of misinformation while digital media may be sources of more accurate information. We test how news and digital media in an authoritarian…
Signaling silence
Networked authoritarian governments’ use of digital repression creates uncertainty and amplifies risk signals for ordinary citizens using social media for political expression. Employing theoretical frameworks from the risk and decision-making literature, we experimentally examine how citizens perceive and respond to the risks of low-effort forms of online activism in an authoritarian context. Our online field experiment demonstrates that emotion…
Walking Through Firewalls
The early hopes of the internet as a technology of 'liberation' have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even the most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication ex…
Maybe Yes, Maybe No?”
This article uses a national online survey to examine whether political ideology moderates the indirect relationship of conservative and nonconservative media use through intra-attitudinal consistency (i.e., ambivalence) and strength of policy position (i.e., how strongly people support or oppose mitigation policies) on intention to take political action regarding the issue of climate change. Results show that conservative media use increases int…
Public Diplomacy, Television News, and Muslim Opinion
Scholars agree that extreme anti-American sentiment is pervasive across the predominantly Muslim countries of the world, but disagree about the sources of these negative perceptions. Some researchers point to cultural, religious, and value divisions as primary factors shaping negative perceptions of the United States, while others emphasize internal Muslim state politics, comparatively low levels of economic and social development, and failure to…
Social Structure and Citizenship
In this study, we develop a model of the interplay between sociostructural determinants of an individual's discussion behavior, such as the setting of primary discussion networks (work, church, and volunteer groups) and the nature of discussion (i.e., level of exposure to non-like-minded ideas), and individual-level outcomes, such as hard news media use, political knowledge, and participation in political processes. In doing so, we synthesize man…
The Engagement Model of Opinion Leadership
Explicating and measuring opinion leadership continues to be an important theoretical topic, as personal influence and interpersonal discussion are widely recognized as shaping public opinion and political behavior. However, the concept of opinion leadership arose out of empirical research conducted primarily within the USA. Whether it may be applied to other national contexts remains to be fully explicated. Furthermore, media information-seeking…
Democracy Based on Difference
This study explores the direct and indirect links between structural heterogeneity, network heterogeneity, and political participation. We review the often conflicting scholarship on discussion network heterogeneity and political participation and place it within a multilevel conceptual framework of heterogeneity. Based on this integrated theoretical model, our study uses a combination of macro-level and individual-level survey data from various …
Darren W. Davis. Negative Liberty
Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy
Journal Article Media Use, Democratic Citizenship, and Communication Gaps in a Developing Democracy Get access Erik C. Nisbet Erik C. Nisbet Erik C. Nisbet is an assistant professor of strategic communication in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. His primary research interests are comparative political communication, opinion formation, and political behavior. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google …
Challenging the State
Several scholars have linked the growth of transnational Arab TV in the Middle East over the past decade to a rise in transnational Muslim and Arab political identification at the expense of national political identity. However, a theoretical context for understanding how media exposure may influence political identification in the Middle East at an individual level of analysis has been lacking, and to date very little quantitative evidence has b…
Boomerang Effects in Science Communication
The deficit-model of science communication assumes increased communication about science issues will move public opinion toward the scientific consensus. However, in the case of climate change, public polarization about the issue has increased in recent years, not diminished. In this study, we draw from theories of motivated reasoning, social identity, and persuasion to examine how science-based messages may increase public polarization on contro…
Environmental Values and the Social Amplification of Risk
As human interaction with wildlife increases due to population growth and development, wildlife managers and risk professionals have increasingly recognized the importance of citizen participation in risk management decision making. Employing a general population telephone survey of upstate New York residents and using a structural equation model analysis, this study examines the roles that environmental values and media use play in promoting pub…
Who's Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications
Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are twofold. First, the authors unpack the term “digital divide” and examine how it has been deployed an…
Internet Use and Democratic Demands
The success of a democracy depends, in part, on public demand for democratic institutions. How does Internet use shape citizens' preferences for regime type? Combining individual public opinion data from Africa and Asia with country-level indices, we test a multilevel model examining the relationship between Internet penetration, individual Internet use, and citizen demand for democracy across 28 countries. We find that Internet use, but not nati…
Mediated public diplomacy
Using Entman’s work on mediated public diplomacy, the authors conducted an Arabic-language online survey of news consumers on Arab websites, including one US-funded media outlet. They examined factors leading to gaps in exposure and perceptions of credibility for three Arab news outlets. Specifically, they examined variables that differentiated between exposure to and perceived credibility regarding the three satellite news media – al-Jazeera, al…
Attitude Change in Competitive Framing Environments? Open-/Closed-Mindedness, Framing Effects, and Climate Change
Framing scholarship on policy issues has primarily focused on how competitive message environments alter framing effects or how individual differences moderate the impact of frames. This study combines both of these focal areas by examining how individual open-/closed-mindedness moderates framing effects about climate change within competitive and noncompetitive framing contexts. Contrary to previous scholarship, our experimental study finds effe…
Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media-Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naïve Theory
Media-based fact checking contributes to more accurate political knowledge, but its corrective effects are limited. We argue that biographical information included in a corrective message, which is often unrelated to the inaccurate claim itself, can activate misperception-congruent naïve theories, increasing confidence in a misperception's plausibility and inducing skepticism toward denials. Resistance to corrections occurs regardless of initial …
What’s the Bandwidth for Democracy? Deconstructing Internet Penetration and Citizen Attitudes About Governance
Recent world events have highlighted the democratic potential of information and communication technologies. This article draws upon the democracy literature to develop a multilevel conceptual framework that links country-level Internet penetration and individual-level Internet use to citizen attitudes about governance in 34 developing countries. In doing so, it deconstructs "Internet penetration" into three dimensions—hardware (e.g., computers),…
Ignorance or bias? Evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change
Does the relationship between media use and learning about climate change depend more on audiences’ scientific literacy on their ideological biases? To answer this question, we evaluate both the knowledge gap and belief gap hypotheses as they relate to climate change. Results indicate belief gaps for news and entertainment content and a knowledge gap for edutainment content. Climate change knowledge among conservatives decreased with greater atte…
The Partisan Brain
There has been deepening concern about political polarization in public attitudes toward the scientific community. The "intrinsic thesis" attributes this polarization to psychological deficiencies among conservatives as compared to liberals. The "contextual thesis" makes no such claims about inherent psychological differences between conservatives and liberals, but rather points to interacting institutional and psychological factors as the forces…
Maybe Yes, Maybe No?”
This article uses a national online survey to examine whether political ideology moderates the indirect relationship of conservative and nonconservative media use through intra-attitudinal consistency (i.e., ambivalence) and strength of policy position (i.e., how strongly people support or oppose mitigation policies) on intention to take political action regarding the issue of climate change. Results show that conservative media use increases int…
Priming the Costs of Conflict? Russian Public Opinion About the 2014 Crimean Conflict
Many have argued that the 2014 Russia–Crimea conflict was inflamed by Russia’s hawkish media propaganda, such that it drove Russian public opinion to support Crimea’s annexation, proving consequential for the state’s foreign policy. This study draws on audience costs and the democratic peace literature to contend that media coverage that highlights the diplomatic, military, and economic costs of conflict may reduce hawkish attitudes among the pub…
Green Narratives
This study examined the relationships between narrative involvement, affect, risk perceptions, and environmental policy preferences. Experiment 1 involved a 3 (news, documentary, entertainment) × 2 (hydraulic fracturing, genetically modified organisms) mixed between- and within-subjects experiment. Results indicated a serial mediation model in which narrative involvement increased the likelihood of a negative affective response, in turn increasin…
A Psychological Firewall? Risk Perceptions and Public Support for Online Censorship in Russia
Objective Authoritarian regimes commonly justify Internet censorship by framing the Internet as a threat to their citizens that must be tightly controlled for their own protection. This threat rhetoric underpins government censorship and creates a “psychological firewall” driving public support for a censored Internet. Methods Based on risk and decision‐making scholarship, we evaluate how mass media and partisan regime support promulgate these th…
Climate change, cultural cognition, and media effects
According to cultural cognition theory, individuals hold opinions about politically contested issues like climate change that are consistent with their “cultural way of life,” conforming their opinions to how they think society should be organized and to what they perceive are the attitudes of their cultural peers. Yet despite dozens of cultural cognition studies, none have directly examined the role of the news media in facilitating these differ…
What Drives Media Use in Authoritarian Regimes? Extending Selective Exposure Theory to Iran
Most work on selective exposure comes from the United States or other western democracies and typically examines partisan attitudes as the cognitive or motivational drivers of selectivity. This study extends the boundary conditions of existing literature by studying the factors affecting media choice in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a drastically understudied context. Within the overarching framework of motivated reasoning, we propose two theoret…
The Psychology of State-Sponsored Disinformation Campaigns and Implications for Public Diplomacy
Policy discourse about disinformation focuses heavily on the technological dimensions of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on technology has led to insufficient attention being paid to the underlying human factors driving the success of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Academic research on disinformation strongly suggests that belief in false or misleading information is driven more by individual …
"Fake news" and the defection of 2012 Obama voters in the 2016 presidential election
Political science (29 works) · Politics (25 works) · Social Media and Politics (24 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Democracy (13 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Law (11 works)