Research Papers

Ben Tappin (2026). Thinking clearly about the value of survey pretesting for practitioners. Preprint.

Ben Tappin, Ryan McKay (2026). Estimating the causal effects of cognitive effort and policy information on party cue influence. Political Psychology.

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Ben Tappin (2026). For digital mass persuasion, exposure matters more than persuasiveness. PsyArXiv.

Kobi Hackenburg, Ben Tappin, Luke Hewitt, Ed Saunders, Sid Black, Hause Lin, Catherine Fist, Helen Margetts, David Rand, Christopher Summerfield (2025). The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI. Science.

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Olaf Borghi, Ben Tappin, Kaat Smets, Manos Tsakiris (2025). Mind over bias: How is cognitive control related to politically motivated reasoning?. Cognition.

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Kobi Hackenburg, Lujain Ibrahim, Ben Tappin, Manos Tsakiris (2025). Comparing the persuasiveness of role-playing large language models and human experts on polarized U.S. political issues. AI & Society.

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Philipp Schoenegger, …, Ben Tappin, et al. (2025). Large language models are more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders. ArXiv.

Kobi Hackenburg, Ben Tappin, Paul Röttger, Scott Hale, Jonathan Bright, Helen Margetts (2025). Scaling language model size yields diminishing returns for single-message political persuasion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ben Tappin, Luke Hewitt (2024). Using survey experiment pretesting to support future pandemic response. PNAS Nexus.

Luke Hewitt, David Broockman, Alexander Coppock, Ben Tappin, James Slezak, Valerie Coffman, Nathaniel Lubin, Mohammad Hamidian (2024). How experiments help campaigns persuade voters: evidence from a large archive of campaigns’ own experiments. American Political Science Review.

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Nick Stagnaro, Ben Tappin, David Rand (2023). No association between numerical ability and politically motivated reasoning in a large US probability sample. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ben Tappin, Chloe Wittenberg, Luke Hewitt, Adam Berinsky, David Rand (2023). Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ben Tappin, Adam Berinsky, David Rand (2023). Partisans’ receptivity to persuasive messaging is undiminished by countervailing party leader cues. Nature Human Behaviour.

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Ben Tappin (2023). Estimating the between-issue variation in party elite cue effects. Public Opinion Quarterly.

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Suzanne Hoogeveen, Alexandra Sarafoglou, …, Ben Tappin, et al. (2022). A many-analysts approach to the relation between religiosity and well-being. Religion, Brain & Behavior.

Luke Hewitt, Ben Tappin (2022). Rank-heterogeneous effects of political messages: Evidence from randomized survey experiments testing 59 video treatments. PsyArXiv.

Chloe Wittenberg, Ben Tappin, Adam Berinsky, David Rand (2021). The (minimal) persuasive advantage of political video over text. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ben Tappin, Luke Hewitt (2021). Estimating the persistence of party cue influence in a panel survey experiment. Journal of Experimental Political Science.

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Valerio Capraro, Jillian Jordan, Ben Tappin (2021). Does observability amplify sensitivity to moral frames? Evaluating a reputation-based account of moral preferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 94, 104103.

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Ben Tappin, Gordon Pennycook, David Rand (2020). Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150, 1095–1114..

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Ben Tappin, Gordon Pennycook, David Rand (2020). Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating. Cognition, 204, 104375.

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Ben Tappin, Gordon Pennycook, David Rand (2020). Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 81-87.

Ben Tappin, Ryan McKay (2019). Moral polarization and out-party hostility in the US political context. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 7(1), 213-245.

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Ben Tappin, Stephen Gadsby (2019). Biased belief in the Bayesian Brain: A deeper look at the evidence. Consciousness and Cognition, 68, 107-114.

Ben Tappin, Ryan McKay (2019). Investigating the relationship between self-perceived moral superiority and moral behavior using economic games. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(2), 135-143.

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Ben Tappin, Valerio Capraro (2018). Doing good vs avoiding bad in prosocial choice: A refined test and extension of the morality preference hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 79, 64-70.

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Ben Tappin, Robert Ross, Ryan McKay (2018). Do the folk actually hold folk-economic beliefs?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e190.

Ben Tappin, Ryan McKay (2017). The illusion of moral superiority. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(6), 623-631.

Ben Tappin, Leslie van der Leer, Ryan McKay (2017). The heart trumps the head: Desirability bias in political belief revision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(8), 1143-1149.

Ben Tappin, Ryan McKay, Dominic Abrams (2017). Choosing the right level of analysis: Stereotypes shape social reality via collective action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e13.