T G L A Van Der Meer
Biographic Data
| ID | 52908 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T G L A Van Der Meer |
| GIVEN NAMES | T G L A |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Der Meer |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DER MEER T G L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7605-2021 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 214 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Is Misinformation All Around Us? Citizens’ Perceptions of Misinformation Nearness Regarding Its Span, Availability, and Accessibility
This study investigates to what extent and how people perceive misinformation as a proximate phenomenon that has infiltrated their everyday digital news domains. Via a survey (US and the Netherlands, N = 1396), that uniquely tasked people with providing hyperlinks to both misinformation and credible information, we explored the perceived span, availability, and accessibility of misinformation. First, citizens’ understanding of misinformation seem…
How Do News Media Frame Society’s Future Problems? Investigating Distance and Scenarios in News Coverage About Climate Change and Aging Populations
Society faces several pressing challenges that demand sustained attention as they unfold. Key examples of such persistent social issues include climate change and aging populations, which are characterized by future-oriented, global considerations and uncertainties. Because of this distance, news media play a crucial role in making these issues relevant to audiences. This study illustrates how two existing concepts important for public understand…
Striking the balance between fake and real: Under what conditions can media literacy messages that warn about misinformation maintain trust in accurate information
Although interventions that warn about the harms of misinformation may be effective in lowering the credibility of false information, they may also cause suspicion related to factually accurate information. To explore these contradictory outcomes of exposure to media literacy messages, we used an online survey experiment with a diverse sample of 1105 participants in the U.S. In this experiment, we randomly exposed people to traditional warning me…
Understanding Audience Threat Perceptions of Misinformation: Insights from Focus Group Discussions with German Media Users
Perceiving misinformation as a threat can have broad implications for society, yet how audiences arrive at such perceptions is not well understood. Using focus groups in Germany ( N = 30), we examine perceived consequences, origins, and signals of misinformation threats. Participants view misinformation as abstract and multifaceted. Perceived consequences span personal to societal harms, while origins are often attributed to distant actors or tec…
Tailored and trust-based: Strategies of information intermediaries countering health misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic
Radical Right-Wing Political Deepfakes Can Successfully Delegitimize Targeted Political Actors: Evidence From Three-wave Experiments in the US and The Netherlands
Political deepfakes potentially undermine democracy by amplifying socio-political divides in hyper-realistic manners. As an important next step in understanding the political consequences of deepfakes, this article reports on the longer-term effects of deepfakes across two different political settings: The US and the Netherlands. We conducted three-wave pre-registered experiments spanning a full week in which we exposed participants in the US and…
Conflicting perceptions: Misalignment between citizens’ and politicians’ evaluations of political conflict
This study examines how citizens and politicians evaluate different types of political conflict. Conflicts can be substantive in nature, involving disagreements over policy measures or clashes over core ideological values, or less substantive, concerning strategic relationships between parties. While conflict is inherent to politics, we know little about how different types of conflict are perceived by the public and how this differs from the per…
Feeling represented yet? How populist and non-populist cues in references to the people affect people’s perceived representation
Beyond textual disinformation: Comparing the effects of textual disinformation to AI-generated and video-based visual disinformation across different issues
Although visual and AI-generated disinformation have been associated with alarming political consequences, we currently lack a clear empirical understanding of the effects of different forms of visual disinformation. Against this background, we rely on a pre-registered experimental study in the United States ( N = 982) in which we exposed participants to various modes of textual and visual disinformation on two different issues: The disappearance…
Are News Media Biting Hard Enough? Public Watchdog Role Expectations and Performance Evaluations in the Era of Big Tech
In the digital age, concerns have been raised about journalism’s watchdog role over Big Tech corporations in particular. Exploring the evolving watchdog role of journalism from an audience perspective, we examine audience expectations and performance evaluations towards news media’s role in Big Tech accountability. Drawing upon a cross-national online survey (n = 2737) conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, France, United Kingdom, United States, …
Organizational readiness for issue polarization: How corporate political engagement can optimize organization-stakeholder issue discussion in social media environment
Purpose As a sticky crisis challenge, toxic polarization continues to mutate and confront organizations and democratic society. How corporations engage stakeholders in social-political issue communication without exacerbating the situation unexpectedly, has become a critical question for corporate communicators and crisis managers. Taking a readiness approach to proactively manage polarization-triggered threats as corporations are engaged in soci…
Readiness as a new framework for crisis management: Academic-industry integrated expert insights from practitioners and scholars
Purpose The study provides an initial empirical examination of Jin et al .’s (2024) new READINESS model through the expert opinions of crisis communication academics and practitioners. Through this examination, the goal is to understand crisis READINESS and how it relates to other key concepts in the crisis literature, such as preparedness and resilience. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory quantitative online survey of 30 experts in crisi…
Do Politicians Knowingly Create Conflict to Gain Media Attention: How Politicians Navigate a Mediatized Environment Characterized by Negativity and Conflict
Given the importance of negativity and conflict in political news, it is assumed that politicians strategically seek conflict or emphasize negativity to secure media coverage. Existing research investigating politicians’ self-mediatization relies on surveys or content analyses, and we have, therefore, little in-depth insight into how politicians navigate the news media’s strong focus on conflict and negativity. Addressing this gap, we conducted 3…
Perceptions of misinformation salience: A cross-country comparison of estimations of misinformation prevalence and third-person perceptions
Against the backdrop of mounting concerns about misinformation's destabilizing impact paired with growing distrust in established news, this study explores how people estimate misinformation salience in their news environment when engaging in comparative risk assessment with other countries. The study derives from two opposite lines of reasoning on risk perceptions: While research indicating the relative scarcity of misinformation might imply an …
How persuasive are political cheapfakes disseminated via social media? The effects of out-of-context visual disinformation on message credibility and issue agreement
Although extant research offered first insights into the effects of visual disinformation, we know markedly little about the effects of cheapfakes that rely on the deceptive re-contextualization of authentic visual materials disseminated via social media. Against this backdrop, we rely on online experiments (N = 874) and (N = 733) in which we exposed representative samples of participants to different types of (visual) disinformation in which the…
Narratives of hope and concern? Examining the impact of climate scientists’ communication on credibility and engagement
Increasingly, more scientists sound the alarm about climate change, sparking debates over the effects of new science communication strategies on scientific credibility. We investigate what happens when climate scientists deviate from science communication that is principally factual and neutral. In an experiment (US sample, N = 882), we investigated if affective expressions and personal stories impact scientists’ credibility and public climate en…
Beyond a fragmented account of conflicts in communication: A framework of informational conflicts
Numerous global trends related to communicative conflicts—like widespread public dissent, the increasing fragmentation of the digital media landscape, the fast-paced dissemination of mis- and disinformation, polarization of public debates, and delegitimizing populist rhetoric—form a perfect storm that significantly disrupts today’s society on multiple levels. Against this backdrop, research on content, causes, consequences, and counter-strategies…
Role Adoption and Decision Making: How Dutch Journalists Dealt with Misinformation during the Covid-19 Pandemic
The Implications of Epistemic Polarization and Factual Relativism for Misinformation Research and Democracy
Credibility and shareworthiness of negative news
Negativity in the news sells, but is such news also perceived as more credible and shareworthy? Given that negative information is more impactful and processed more easily, a positive-negative asymmetry might also exist in news processing. This negativity bias is explored in a two-part experiment ( N = 696) where respondents rated (a) multiple positive and negative news items and (b) conflicting news on perceived credibility and shareworthiness. …
Expectation dissonance: The role of perceived negativity bias in enterprise social media in explaining accountability and support
Purpose Enterprise social media (ESM) are expressive spaces where users exchange emotional workplace communication. While some studies have explored how positive emotions may be contagious, little research explored the notion that negative communication may accumulate on enterprise social media. This study explores perceived negativity bias and its correlates in the context of ESM. Design/methodology/approach This study relies on survey data coll…
Distorting the truth versus blatant lies: The effects of different degrees of deception in domestic and foreign political deepfakes
Political deepfakes are regarded as an urgent threat to democracy. However, we know little about how different degrees of deception in deepfakes affect recipients’ credibility perceptions and the delegitimization of the target of the deepfake. Against this backdrop, we conducted a comparative experiment in the US and the Netherlands (N = 1187) to map the effects of domestic and foreign political deepfakes delegitimizing a prominent Democrat polit…
The watchdog role in the age of Big Tech – how news media in the United States and Germany hold Big Tech corporations accountable
The unprecedented power of Big Tech corporations and the complexity of regulating them requires considering the role of news media as a corporate accountability mechanism. The aim of this article is to examine news media’s watchdog role through a performative lens, extending it to the corporate context by looking at three manifestations of performance: media visibility, way of coverage, and sourcing patterns. Based on a longitudinal quantitative …
Patterns of News Consumption during the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis: A 2.5 Year Longitudinal Study in the Netherlands
During major long-term crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, news media are crucial sources of information for the public. This study aimed to explore the frequency of COVID-19-related news consumption based on (1) phase of the pandemic, (2) socio-demographic characteristics, and (3) news information channels. The study used a dynamic cohort design with 18 rounds of data collection, including 306,692 responses from 83,180 unique respondents in t…
They Would Never Say Anything Like This! Reasons To Doubt Political Deepfakes
Although deepfakes are conventionally regarded as dangerous, we know little about how deepfakes are perceived, and which potential motivations drive doubt in the believability of deepfakes versus authentic videos. To better understand the audience's perceptions of deepfakes, we ran an online experiment ( N = 829) in which participants were randomly exposed to a politician's textual or audio-visual authentic speech or a textual or audio-visual man…
Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries
Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens’ policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels o…
A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies? The Effects and Mechanisms of Multimodal Disinformation and Rebuttals Disseminated via Social Media
Today's fragmented and digital media environment may create a fertile breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation. Although previous research has investigated the effects of misinformation and corrective efforts, we know too little about the role of visuals in disinformation and fact checking. Against this backdrop, we conducted an online experiment with a diverse sample of U.S. citizens (N = 1,404) to investigate the credibilit…
Can Fighting Misinformation Have a Negative Spillover Effect? How Warnings for the Threat of Misinformation Can Decrease General News Credibility
In the battle against misinformation, do negative spillover effects of communicative efforts intended to protect audiences from inaccurate information exist? Given the relatively limited prevalence of misinformation in people’s news diets, this study explores if the heightened salience of misinformation as a persistent societal threat can have an unintended spillover effect by decreasing the credibility of factually accurate news. Using an experi…
Disrupting gatekeeping practices: Journalists’ source selection in times of crisis
As gatekeepers, journalists have the power to select the sources that get a voice in crisis coverage. The aim of this study is to find out how journalists select sources during a crisis. In a survey, journalists were asked how they assess the following sources during an organizational crisis: news agencies, an organization undergoing a crisis, and the general public. The sample consisted of 214 Dutch experienced journalists who at least once cove…
Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News: The case of airplane crashes
Do news media increasingly portray a distorted world image when reporting menace? The purpose of this study is to investigate how media attention for negative incidents evolves over time and how this relates to real-world trends and public responses. A longitudinal content analysis (1991–2015) of media coverage of aviation incidents is used to provide a systematic investigation into the trends of media attention related to real-world data. Result…
Crafting Our Own Biased Media Diets: The Effects of Confirmation, Source, and Negativity Bias on Selective Attendance to Online News
Audiences’ online information acquisition has raised questions about the nature of selective exposure in today’s high-choice and fragmented news environment. To offer an overview of the relative contribution of several key drivers of selective exposure to political news, we assess the guiding influence of (1) confirmation bias, (2) source bias, and (3) negativity bias. The findings of an experiment in two countries (UK and US, N = 858), demonstra…
Fighting biased news diets: Using news media literacy interventions to stimulate online cross-cutting media exposure patterns
Online news consumers have the tendency to select political news that confirms their prior attitudes, which may further fuel polarized divides in society. Despite scholarly attention to drivers of selective exposure, we know too little about how healthier cross-cutting news exposure patterns can be stimulated in digital media environments. Study 1 ( N = 553) exposed people to news media literacy (NML) interventions using injunctive and descriptiv…
You Won't Believe What They Just Said! The Effects of Political Deepfakes Embedded as Vox Populi on Social Media
Disinformation has been regarded as a key threat to democracy. Yet, we know little about the effects of different modalities of disinformation, or the impact of disinformation disseminated through (inauthentic) social media accounts of ordinary citizens. To test the effects of different forms of disinformation and their embedding, we conducted an experimental study in the Netherlands ( N = 1,244). In this experiment, we investigated the effects o…
On Behalf of the People: The Use of Public Opinion and the Perception of “the People” in Political Communication Strategies of Dutch MPs
This study investigates the role of public opinion for members of parliaments (MPs) in a time in which communication about the will of “the People” is high on the political agenda. By means of face-to-face elite interviews with Dutch MPs, we explore who politicians perceive as “the People,” how they assess “the will of the People,” and how this translates into their communication strategies. We find that MPs distinguish between listening to indiv…
They Would Never Say Anything Like This! Reasons To Doubt Political Deepfakes
Although deepfakes are conventionally regarded as dangerous, we know little about how deepfakes are perceived, and which potential motivations drive doubt in the believability of deepfakes versus authentic videos. To better understand the audience's perceptions of deepfakes, we ran an online experiment ( N = 829) in which participants were randomly exposed to a politician's textual or audio-visual authentic speech or a textual or audio-visual man…
Not All Parties are Treated Equally Journalist Perceptions of Partisan News Bias
Journalists and news media in Western democracies appear to be under increasing fire for having an alleged partisan bias. This study joins the increasing number of studies on partisan news slant, and focuses on the central actors in the news-making process, namely journalists themselves. Drawing on unique survey evidence on 233 Belgian and Dutch journalists in 2018, this study explores whether and which journalists perceive their news outlets to …
Selection in a Snapshot? The Contribution of Visuals to the Selection and Avoidance of Political News in Information-Rich Media Settings
The psychological bases of the selection and attitudinal response to news media have received ample attention in political communication research. However, the interplay between three crucial factors in today’s online, high-choice news media settings remains understudied: (1) textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) communication; (2) attitude congruent versus attitude incongruent versus balanced content; and (3) political versus nonpolitical…
The Role of Media Use and Misinformation Perceptions in Optimistic Bias and Third-person Perceptions in Times of High Media Dependency: Evidence from Four Countries in the First Stage of the Covid-19 …
When societies are struck by large-scale disruptions, biases in citizens’ personal risk assessment and the spread of misinformation are often reason for concern. As a contribution, this study aims to link individuals’ biased perceptions of self-other asymmetry—i.e., optimistic bias in risk assessment and third-person perception regarding undesired media influence—to different patterns of news consumption and misinformation perceptions. To study t…
Who’s to Fear? Implicit Sexual Threat Pre and Post the “Refugee Crisis”
The perceived sexual threat of ethnic outgroups has been argued to contribute to anti-immigrant attitudes within societies. The current study investigates to what extent news media might contribute to such negative outgroup perceptions by analyzing implicit sexual threat associations in Dutch news. The study draws on a sample of more than two million news articles published between 2008 and 2018 in five major Dutch newspapers. To identify implici…
Stepping on Toes? Role Dynamics between Journalists and Lobbyists Regarding Big Tech’s Accountability Agenda
The expanding political role of Big Tech(nology) corporations has triggered concerns about the role of the media in holding corporate power to account. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of role dynamics between journalists and lobbyists toward the agenda for Big Tech’s responsibilities. Based on semi-structured interviews with European journalists ( n = 15) and lobbyists representing large technology corporations ( n = 15), we use…
Appeals to the people: A content analysis of references to the people in traditional media, social media, and parliamentary materials
Political representation lies at the heart of representative democracy. In order to signal their connection to the people they are representing, politicians often refer to “the people.” In this study, we focus on how politicians refer to the people and how this varies across three main platforms of communication differing in access and formality: news media, social media, and the parliament. Through an in-depth content analysis of news articles, …
E-Democracy: Exploring the Current Stage of e-Government
Governments around the world have been pressured to implement e-Government programs in order to improve the government-citizen dialogue. The authors of this article review prior literature on such efforts to find if they lead to increased democratic participation (“e-Democracy”) for the affected citizens, with a focus on the key concepts of transparency, openness, and engagement. The authors find that such efforts are a starting point toward e-De…
Disrupting gatekeeping practices: Journalists’ source selection in times of crisis
As gatekeepers, journalists have the power to select the sources that get a voice in crisis coverage. The aim of this study is to find out how journalists select sources during a crisis. In a survey, journalists were asked how they assess the following sources during an organizational crisis: news agencies, an organization undergoing a crisis, and the general public. The sample consisted of 214 Dutch experienced journalists who at least once cove…
Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News: The case of airplane crashes
Do news media increasingly portray a distorted world image when reporting menace? The purpose of this study is to investigate how media attention for negative incidents evolves over time and how this relates to real-world trends and public responses. A longitudinal content analysis (1991–2015) of media coverage of aviation incidents is used to provide a systematic investigation into the trends of media attention related to real-world data. Result…
Picture Power? The Contribution of Visuals and Text to Partisan Selective Exposure
Today’s high-choice media environment allows citizens to select news in line with their political preferences and avoid content counter to their priors. So far, however, selective exposure research has exclusively studied news selection based on textual cues, ignoring the recent proliferation of visual media. This study aimed to identify the contribution of visuals alongside text in selective exposure to pro-attitudinal, counter-attitudinal and b…
Seeking Formula for Misinformation Treatment in Public Health Crises: The Effects of Corrective Information Type and Source
An increasing lack of information truthfulness has become a fundamental challenge to communications. Insights into how to debunk this type of misinformation can especially be crucial for public health crises. To identify corrective information strategies that increase awareness and trigger actions during infectious disease outbreaks, an online experiment (N = 700) was conducted, using a U.S. sample. After initial misinformation exposure, particip…
On Behalf of the People: The Use of Public Opinion and the Perception of “the People” in Political Communication Strategies of Dutch MPs
This study investigates the role of public opinion for members of parliaments (MPs) in a time in which communication about the will of “the People” is high on the political agenda. By means of face-to-face elite interviews with Dutch MPs, we explore who politicians perceive as “the People,” how they assess “the will of the People,” and how this translates into their communication strategies. We find that MPs distinguish between listening to indiv…
Misinformation and Polarization in a High-Choice Media Environment: How Effective Are Political Fact-Checkers?
One of the most fundamental changes in today’s political information environment is an increasing lack of communicative truthfulness. To explore this worrisome phenomenon, this study aims to investigate the effects of political misinformation by integrating three theoretical approaches: (1) misinformation, (2) polarization, and (3) selective exposure. In this article, we examine the role of fact-checkers in discrediting polarized misinformation i…
Fight or flight? Attributing responsibility in response to mixed congruent and incongruent partisan news in selective exposure media environments
In today’s media environment, the flow of incoming information can be overwhelming. Citizens are exposed to both congruent and incongruent information, following each other at a fast pace. At the same time, citizens have the freedom to compose their own daily information diet. This demanding and personalized media environment plays a decisive role in political decision-making. One crucial political evaluation is to assign credit or blame to polit…
Selection in a Snapshot? The Contribution of Visuals to the Selection and Avoidance of Political News in Information-Rich Media Settings
The psychological bases of the selection and attitudinal response to news media have received ample attention in political communication research. However, the interplay between three crucial factors in today’s online, high-choice news media settings remains understudied: (1) textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) communication; (2) attitude congruent versus attitude incongruent versus balanced content; and (3) political versus nonpolitical…
Crafting Our Own Biased Media Diets: The Effects of Confirmation, Source, and Negativity Bias on Selective Attendance to Online News
Audiences’ online information acquisition has raised questions about the nature of selective exposure in today’s high-choice and fragmented news environment. To offer an overview of the relative contribution of several key drivers of selective exposure to political news, we assess the guiding influence of (1) confirmation bias, (2) source bias, and (3) negativity bias. The findings of an experiment in two countries (UK and US, N = 858), demonstra…
Fighting biased news diets: Using news media literacy interventions to stimulate online cross-cutting media exposure patterns
Online news consumers have the tendency to select political news that confirms their prior attitudes, which may further fuel polarized divides in society. Despite scholarly attention to drivers of selective exposure, we know too little about how healthier cross-cutting news exposure patterns can be stimulated in digital media environments. Study 1 ( N = 553) exposed people to news media literacy (NML) interventions using injunctive and descriptiv…
A Picture Paints a Thousand Lies? The Effects and Mechanisms of Multimodal Disinformation and Rebuttals Disseminated via Social Media
Today's fragmented and digital media environment may create a fertile breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation. Although previous research has investigated the effects of misinformation and corrective efforts, we know too little about the role of visuals in disinformation and fact checking. Against this backdrop, we conducted an online experiment with a diverse sample of U.S. citizens (N = 1,404) to investigate the credibilit…
Confirming Bias Without Knowing? Automatic Pathways Between Media Exposure and Selectivity
This study moves beyond previous research by demonstrating how prior exposure to stereotypical content can reinforce the selection of comparable biased news content and by clarifying its intergroup and interpersonal consequences. With two experiments ( N = 236, N = 270), we show that media effects and selectivity of biased media content about Arabic migrant workers are connected by automatic (i.e., implicit) stereotypes. The findings reveal that …
Who’s to Fear? Implicit Sexual Threat Pre and Post the “Refugee Crisis”
The perceived sexual threat of ethnic outgroups has been argued to contribute to anti-immigrant attitudes within societies. The current study investigates to what extent news media might contribute to such negative outgroup perceptions by analyzing implicit sexual threat associations in Dutch news. The study draws on a sample of more than two million news articles published between 2008 and 2018 in five major Dutch newspapers. To identify implici…
I Knew It, the World is Falling Apart! Combatting a Confirmatory Negativity Bias in Audiences’ News Selection Through News Media Literacy Interventions
Do people with a more pessimistic worldview also select more like-minded news that confirms their negative—sometimes irrational—outlook on reality? This study theorizes that, based on the negativity and confirmation biases in audience digital news selection, a pessimistic outlook increases the likelihood of self-selection of more negative and episodic headlines over positive and thematic news. In a next step, news media literacy (NML) literature …
Can we trust measures of trust? a comparison of results from open and closed questions
Many public opinion surveys compare trust in a number of different information and (mediated) knowledge sources, typically using closed questions with a set of answer categories that are imposed by researchers. We aim to validate these categories by quantitatively comparing survey responses about trustworthy sources using open and closed questions, and by qualitatively analyzing the open answers. The results show that answer options typically use…
Civilized truths, hateful lies? Incivility and hate speech in false information – evidence from fact-checked statements in the US
Digital information settings may not only offer an opportunity structure for democratic deliberation, but also facilitate the occurrence of negative phenomena – such as incivility, hate speech and false information. Even though extant literature has provided theoretical arguments for a discursive affinity between false or deceptive information and uncivil speech, we lack empirical evidence on whether and how false information and incivility conve…
Do News Media Kill? How a Biased News Reality can Overshadow Real Societal Risks, The Case of Aviation and Road Traffic Accidents
Is irrational risk-avoiding behavior related to news media’s heightened attention for the negative and exceptional? Based on the theoretical approaches of mediatization and cultivation, it is hypothesized how news media can present an overly negative and biased reality that can have a severe impact on society. Focusing on the case of travel accidents, we argue that a disproportional increase in news attention for low-probability high-consequence …
Does Information about Bias Attenuate Selective Exposure? The Effects of Implicit Bias Feedback on the Selection of Outgroup-Rich News
People’s news diets are shaped by a diverse set of selection biases that may be unconscious in nature. This study investigates whether providing individuals with information about such unconscious biases attenuates selective exposure. More specifically, in two selective-exposure experiments among Dutch ingroup members focusing on ethnic (N = 286) and religious (N = 277) minorities, we expose individuals to their unconscious prejudices as measured…
The Role of Media Use and Misinformation Perceptions in Optimistic Bias and Third-person Perceptions in Times of High Media Dependency: Evidence from Four Countries in the First Stage of the Covid-19 …
When societies are struck by large-scale disruptions, biases in citizens’ personal risk assessment and the spread of misinformation are often reason for concern. As a contribution, this study aims to link individuals’ biased perceptions of self-other asymmetry—i.e., optimistic bias in risk assessment and third-person perception regarding undesired media influence—to different patterns of news consumption and misinformation perceptions. To study t…
You Won't Believe What They Just Said! The Effects of Political Deepfakes Embedded as Vox Populi on Social Media
Disinformation has been regarded as a key threat to democracy. Yet, we know little about the effects of different modalities of disinformation, or the impact of disinformation disseminated through (inauthentic) social media accounts of ordinary citizens. To test the effects of different forms of disinformation and their embedding, we conducted an experimental study in the Netherlands ( N = 1,244). In this experiment, we investigated the effects o…
Can Fighting Misinformation Have a Negative Spillover Effect? How Warnings for the Threat of Misinformation Can Decrease General News Credibility
In the battle against misinformation, do negative spillover effects of communicative efforts intended to protect audiences from inaccurate information exist? Given the relatively limited prevalence of misinformation in people’s news diets, this study explores if the heightened salience of misinformation as a persistent societal threat can have an unintended spillover effect by decreasing the credibility of factually accurate news. Using an experi…
Not All Parties are Treated Equally Journalist Perceptions of Partisan News Bias
Journalists and news media in Western democracies appear to be under increasing fire for having an alleged partisan bias. This study joins the increasing number of studies on partisan news slant, and focuses on the central actors in the news-making process, namely journalists themselves. Drawing on unique survey evidence on 233 Belgian and Dutch journalists in 2018, this study explores whether and which journalists perceive their news outlets to …
Appeals to the people: A content analysis of references to the people in traditional media, social media, and parliamentary materials
Political representation lies at the heart of representative democracy. In order to signal their connection to the people they are representing, politicians often refer to “the people.” In this study, we focus on how politicians refer to the people and how this varies across three main platforms of communication differing in access and formality: news media, social media, and the parliament. Through an in-depth content analysis of news articles, …
Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries
Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens’ policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels o…
Political science (40 works) · Psychology (32 works) · Social Media and Politics (29 works) · Law (25 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (17 works)