Allison M Gue
Biographic Data
| ID | 808660 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Allison M Gue |
| GIVEN NAMES | Allison M |
| FAMILY NAME | Gue |
| SIGNATURE | GUE A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2974-7848 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 597 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Does Listening to Trustworthy News Affect Political Attitudes and Trust?
Unbundling Digital Media Literacy Tips: Results from Two Experiments
Recent studies have found promising evidence that lightweight, scalable tips promoting digital media literacy can improve the overall accuracy of social media users’ sharing intentions and improve their ability to determine the accuracy of true versus false headlines. However, existing research is designed to test entire bundles of such tips, which limits our practical knowledge about whether some kinds of tips are more effective than others and …
Rumors in Retweet: Ideological Asymmetry in the Failure to Correct Misinformation
We used supervised machine-learning techniques to examine ideological asymmetries in online rumor transmission. Although liberals were more likely than conservatives to communicate in general about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings (Study 1, N = 26,422) and 2020 death of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (Study 2, N = 141,670), conservatives were more likely to share rumors. Rumor-spreading decreased among liberals following official correction,…
The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 Election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special in how it propagates? We answer these questions by analyzing the virality of and exposure to information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. We examine the diffusion trees of the approximately 1 B posts that were re-shared at least once by U.S.-based adults from July 1, 2020, to Feb…
Analysis of Web Browsing Data: A Guide
The use of individual-level browsing data, that is, the records of a person’s visits to online content through a desktop or mobile browser, is of increasing importance for social scientists. Browsing data have characteristics that raise many questions for statistical analysis, yet to date, little hands-on guidance on how to handle them exists. Reviewing extant research, and exploring data sets collected by our four research teams spanning seven c…
Who's cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data
In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once acro…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increase…
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content the…
Digital literacy and online political behavior
Digital literacy is receiving increased scholarly attention as a potential explanatory factor in the spread of misinformation and other online pathologies. As a concept, however, it remains surprisingly elusive, with little consensus on definitions or measures. We provide a digital literacy framework for political scientists and test survey items to measure it with an application to online information retrieval tasks. There exists substantial var…
When Do Sources Persuade? The Effect of Source Credibility on Opinion Change
Discussions around declining trust in the US media can be vague about its effects. One classic answer comes from the persuasion literature, in which source credibility plays a key role. However, existing research almost universally takes credibility as a given. To overcome the potentially severe confounding that can result from this, we create a hypothetical news outlet and manipulate to what extent it is portrayed as credible. We then randomly a…
What’s Not to Like? Facebook Page Likes Reveal Limited Polarization in Lifestyle Preferences
Increasing levels of political animosity in the United States invite speculation about whether polarization extends to aspects of daily life. However, empirical study about the relationship between political ideologies and lifestyle choices is limited by a lack of comprehensive data. In this research, we combine survey and Facebook Page "likes" data from more than 1,200 respondents to investigate the extent of polarization in lifestyle domains. O…
The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on Covid-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
The consequences of online partisan media
Significance Popular wisdom suggests that the internet plays a major role in influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors related to politics, such as by providing slanted sources of information. Yet evidence for this proposition is elusive due to methodological difficulties and the multifaceted nature of online media effects. This study breaks ground by demonstrating a nudge-like approach for exploring these effects through a combination of real…
Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility
Significance Although Americans believe the confusion caused by false news is extensive, relatively few indicate having seen or shared it—a discrepancy suggesting that members of the public may not only have a hard time identifying false news but fail to recognize their own deficiencies at doing so. If people incorrectly see themselves as highly skilled at identifying false news, they may unwittingly participate in its circulation. In this large-…
The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity
Though prior studies have analyzed the textual characteristics of online comments about politics, less is known about how selection into commenting behavior and exposure to other people’s comments changes the tone and content of political discourse. This article makes three contributions. First, we show that frequent commenters on Facebook are more likely to be interested in politics, to have more polarized opinions, and to use toxic language in …
The Effects of Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud on Confidence in Elections
Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections – a time…
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets
Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large‐N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classification to identify individual articles related to news about politics. I find that most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate medi…
Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda
The research literature on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda is vast and sprawling. This chapter discusses descriptive research on the supply and availability of misinformation, patterns of exposure and consumption, and what is known about mechanisms behind its spread through networks. It provides a brief overview of the literature on misinformation in political science and psychology, which provides a basis for understanding the phe…
Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments
Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample …
Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election
Can the Government Deter Discrimination? Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in New York City
Racial discrimination persists despite established antidiscrimination laws. A common government strategy to deter discrimination is to publicize the law and communicate potential penalties for violations. We study this strategy by coupling an audit experiment with a randomized intervention involving nearly 700 landlords in New York City and report the first causal estimates of the effect on rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics of a …
How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics
How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about p…
(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets
Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large‐N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classification to identify individual articles related to news about politics. I find that most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate medi…
Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments
Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample …
The Effects of Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud on Confidence in Elections
Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections – a time…
Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election
Measure for Measure: An Experimental Test of Online Political Media Exposure
Self-reported measures of media exposure are plagued with error and questions about validity. Since they are essential to studying media effects, a substantial literature has explored the shortcomings of these measures, tested proxies, and proposed refinements. But lacking an objective baseline, such investigations can only make relative comparisons. By focusing specifically on recent Internet activity stored by Web browsers, this article's metho…
How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics
How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about p…
Geotheorizing Black/Land
In this article, researchers from an academic institution and researchers from a community-based organization theorize a recent collaboration. This "contingent collaboration" was designed to analyze interviews that had been conducted by the community organization and required the purposeful negotiation of two thresholds, one methodological, the other empirical. Writing together across diverse experiences with academic research, the authors consid…
Digital literacy and online political behavior
Digital literacy is receiving increased scholarly attention as a potential explanatory factor in the spread of misinformation and other online pathologies. As a concept, however, it remains surprisingly elusive, with little consensus on definitions or measures. We provide a digital literacy framework for political scientists and test survey items to measure it with an application to online information retrieval tasks. There exists substantial var…
When Treatments are Tweets: A Network Mobilization Experiment over Twitter
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on Covid-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Responsiveness without Representation: Evidence from Minimum Wage Laws in U.S. States
How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same…
What’s Not to Like? Facebook Page Likes Reveal Limited Polarization in Lifestyle Preferences
Increasing levels of political animosity in the United States invite speculation about whether polarization extends to aspects of daily life. However, empirical study about the relationship between political ideologies and lifestyle choices is limited by a lack of comprehensive data. In this research, we combine survey and Facebook Page "likes" data from more than 1,200 respondents to investigate the extent of polarization in lifestyle domains. O…
Can the Government Deter Discrimination? Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in New York City
Racial discrimination persists despite established antidiscrimination laws. A common government strategy to deter discrimination is to publicize the law and communicate potential penalties for violations. We study this strategy by coupling an audit experiment with a randomized intervention involving nearly 700 landlords in New York City and report the first causal estimates of the effect on rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics of a …
Analysis of Web Browsing Data: A Guide
The use of individual-level browsing data, that is, the records of a person’s visits to online content through a desktop or mobile browser, is of increasing importance for social scientists. Browsing data have characteristics that raise many questions for statistical analysis, yet to date, little hands-on guidance on how to handle them exists. Reviewing extant research, and exploring data sets collected by our four research teams spanning seven c…
Who's cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data
In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once acro…
When Do Sources Persuade? The Effect of Source Credibility on Opinion Change
Discussions around declining trust in the US media can be vague about its effects. One classic answer comes from the persuasion literature, in which source credibility plays a key role. However, existing research almost universally takes credibility as a given. To overcome the potentially severe confounding that can result from this, we create a hypothetical news outlet and manipulate to what extent it is portrayed as credible. We then randomly a…
Reaching to Offer, Reaching to Accept: Collaboration and Cotheorizing
The mountains that we see around us are black. . . .In the Spring, the hot black soil melts the
Geotheorizing Black/Land
In this article, researchers from an academic institution and researchers from a community-based organization theorize a recent collaboration. This "contingent collaboration" was designed to analyze interviews that had been conducted by the community organization and required the purposeful negotiation of two thresholds, one methodological, the other empirical. Writing together across diverse experiences with academic research, the authors consid…
Measure for Measure: An Experimental Test of Online Political Media Exposure
Self-reported measures of media exposure are plagued with error and questions about validity. Since they are essential to studying media effects, a substantial literature has explored the shortcomings of these measures, tested proxies, and proposed refinements. But lacking an objective baseline, such investigations can only make relative comparisons. By focusing specifically on recent Internet activity stored by Web browsers, this article's metho…
When Treatments are Tweets: A Network Mobilization Experiment over Twitter
Reaching to Offer, Reaching to Accept: Collaboration and Cotheorizing
The mountains that we see around us are black. . . .In the Spring, the hot black soil melts the
How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics
How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about p…
Responsiveness without Representation: Evidence from Minimum Wage Laws in U.S. States
How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same…
Can the Government Deter Discrimination? Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in New York City
Racial discrimination persists despite established antidiscrimination laws. A common government strategy to deter discrimination is to publicize the law and communicate potential penalties for violations. We study this strategy by coupling an audit experiment with a randomized intervention involving nearly 700 landlords in New York City and report the first causal estimates of the effect on rental discrimination against blacks and Hispanics of a …
Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda
The research literature on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda is vast and sprawling. This chapter discusses descriptive research on the supply and availability of misinformation, patterns of exposure and consumption, and what is known about mechanisms behind its spread through networks. It provides a brief overview of the literature on misinformation in political science and psychology, which provides a basis for understanding the phe…
Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments
Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample …
Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election
The consequences of online partisan media
Significance Popular wisdom suggests that the internet plays a major role in influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors related to politics, such as by providing slanted sources of information. Yet evidence for this proposition is elusive due to methodological difficulties and the multifaceted nature of online media effects. This study breaks ground by demonstrating a nudge-like approach for exploring these effects through a combination of real…
Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility
Significance Although Americans believe the confusion caused by false news is extensive, relatively few indicate having seen or shared it—a discrepancy suggesting that members of the public may not only have a hard time identifying false news but fail to recognize their own deficiencies at doing so. If people incorrectly see themselves as highly skilled at identifying false news, they may unwittingly participate in its circulation. In this large-…
The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity
Though prior studies have analyzed the textual characteristics of online comments about politics, less is known about how selection into commenting behavior and exposure to other people’s comments changes the tone and content of political discourse. This article makes three contributions. First, we show that frequent commenters on Facebook are more likely to be interested in politics, to have more polarized opinions, and to use toxic language in …
The Effects of Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud on Confidence in Elections
Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections – a time…
Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on conve…
(Almost) Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets
Does the internet facilitate selective exposure to politically congenial content? To answer this question, I introduce and validate large‐N behavioral data on Americans' online media consumption in both 2015 and 2016. I then construct a simple measure of media diet slant and use machine classification to identify individual articles related to news about politics. I find that most people across the political spectrum have relatively moderate medi…
When Do Sources Persuade? The Effect of Source Credibility on Opinion Change
Discussions around declining trust in the US media can be vague about its effects. One classic answer comes from the persuasion literature, in which source credibility plays a key role. However, existing research almost universally takes credibility as a given. To overcome the potentially severe confounding that can result from this, we create a hypothetical news outlet and manipulate to what extent it is portrayed as credible. We then randomly a…
What’s Not to Like? Facebook Page Likes Reveal Limited Polarization in Lifestyle Preferences
Increasing levels of political animosity in the United States invite speculation about whether polarization extends to aspects of daily life. However, empirical study about the relationship between political ideologies and lifestyle choices is limited by a lack of comprehensive data. In this research, we combine survey and Facebook Page "likes" data from more than 1,200 respondents to investigate the extent of polarization in lifestyle domains. O…
The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on Covid-19 misperceptions in the United States, Great Britain and Canada
Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing
Many critics raise concerns about the prevalence of ‘echo chambers’ on social media and their potential role in increasing political polarization. However, the lack of available data and the challenges of conducting large-scale field experiments have made it difficult to assess the scope of the problem 1,2 . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from ‘like-minded’ s…
Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increase…
How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content the…
Digital literacy and online political behavior
Digital literacy is receiving increased scholarly attention as a potential explanatory factor in the spread of misinformation and other online pathologies. As a concept, however, it remains surprisingly elusive, with little consensus on definitions or measures. We provide a digital literacy framework for political scientists and test survey items to measure it with an application to online information retrieval tasks. There exists substantial var…
Rumors in Retweet: Ideological Asymmetry in the Failure to Correct Misinformation
We used supervised machine-learning techniques to examine ideological asymmetries in online rumor transmission. Although liberals were more likely than conservatives to communicate in general about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings (Study 1, N = 26,422) and 2020 death of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (Study 2, N = 141,670), conservatives were more likely to share rumors. Rumor-spreading decreased among liberals following official correction,…
The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 Election
Social media creates the possibility for rapid, viral spread of content, but how many posts actually reach millions? And is misinformation special in how it propagates? We answer these questions by analyzing the virality of and exposure to information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. We examine the diffusion trees of the approximately 1 B posts that were re-shared at least once by U.S.-based adults from July 1, 2020, to Feb…
Political science (25 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Social Media and Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Media Influence and Politics (13 works) · Advertising (12 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (12 works)