The results show that trust in news content itself responds quickly to visible changes in editorial control and perceived partisanship. Within just a few months of these reforms, audiences were evaluating actual content differently, not just shifting their expressed trust in the source.
Post-reform, the TVP brand cue was null for both partisan groups, and blind condition preferences for aligned content disappeared as well. Polarization around TVP had collapsed — but trust didn't simply flip. PiS supporters didn't come to distrust TVP the way opponents once had.
Pre-reform, the TVP label had large, polarized effects on PiS supporters’ and opponents’ trust in content, with effect sizes much larger than what we had found in a similar US study on Fox News and CNN. Even absent the label, news audiences preferred the content of aligned sources.
We showed respondents news excerpts from TVP and the private outlet TVN, randomizing the inclusion of the source label. This let us measure whether audiences prefer the content of one outlet over the other even without knowing the source, and how the brand label itself shifts trust in that content.
Background: Under the PiS government (2015-2023), Poland's public broadcaster TVP became a widely acknowledged pro-PiS propaganda outlet. By 2021, 76% of Poles believed TVP favored the ruling party. Attitudes toward it split sharply along partisan lines.
We ran two experiments before and after Poland’s new government implemented major reforms of public media in 2023 to see if top-down institutional reform aimed at depoliticizing public media could change how citizens evaluate actual news content.
New paper with Gabriela Czarnek, @dgrand.bsky.social and @adamberinsky.bsky.social out in Political Behavior! Link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
🚨New review🚨 Do warning labels on misinformation actually work?
In Current Opinion in Psychology, @dgrand.bsky.social & I show that the answer is YES: warnings can reduce belief & sharing by ~25-50%!
We also review moderators (eg more visible=bigger effect)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
new paper!
🚨WP🚨
Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, right?
WRONG: We show that brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20pp (d~1)!
🡆Tailored AI response rebuts specific evidence offered by believers
🡆Effect undiminished after 2mo
🡆Works even on entrenched beliefs
osf.io/preprints/ps...
reposting again. application portal is open and we will be reviewing files on a rolling basis.
Neat new article in Post-Soviet Affairs about how Russian television covers foreign protests. A tricky issue. Kremlin wants to show instability outside of Russia, but also wants to say "Kids, don't try this at home." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
I'll be recruiting a PhD student in the next cycle - please pass this along to anyone who might interested in joining my lab at Cornell! Open-ended, but interest in topics relating to intuition/reason, metacognition, overconfidence, misinformation, or beliefs is a bonus!
Hi @salahbhpolisci.bsky.social can I be added to the list? Thanks!