Party cues can influence public opinion, but the extent to which they do so varies dramatically from context to context. Why? The long-standing theory that party cues function as “heuristics” provides an answer, predicting that variation in exposure …
An essay in which I argue that content exposure matters more than its persuasiveness for having mass persuasive impact on digital media. Originally posted on Substack.
There are widespread fears that conversational artificial intelligence (AI) could soon exert unprecedented influence over human beliefs. In this work, in three large-scale experiments (N = 76,977 participants), we deployed 19 large language models …
People often favour information aligned with their ideological motives. Can our tendency for directional motivated reasoning be overcome with cognitive control? It remains contested whether cognitive control processes, such as cognitive reflection …
Advances in large language models (LLMs) could significantly disrupt political communication. In a large-scale pre-registered experiment (n = 4,955), we prompted GPT-4 to generate persuasive messages impersonating the language and beliefs of U.S. …
We directly compare the persuasion capabilities of a frontier large language model (LLM; Claude Sonnet 3.5) against incentivized human persuaders in an interactive, real-time conversational quiz setting. In this preregistered, large-scale …
Large language models can now generate political messages as persuasive as those written by humans, raising concerns about how far this persuasiveness may continue to increase with model size. Here, we generate 720 persuasive messages on 10 US …
The world could witness another pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 in the future, prompting calls for research into how social and behavioral science can better contribute to pandemic response, especially regarding public engagement and communication. …
Political campaigns increasingly conduct experiments to learn how to persuade voters. Little research has considered the implications of this trend for elections or democracy. To probe these implications, we analyze a unique archive of 146 …
The highly influential theory of “Motivated System 2 Reasoning” argues that analytical, deliberative (“System 2”) reasoning is hijacked by identity when considering ideologically charged issues—leading people who are more likely to engage in such …