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Dr. Ray Pingree
Assistant Prof
Contact Information
School of Communication
The Ohio State University
Tel: (614) 247-2108
Fax: (614) 292-2055
pingree.2@osu.edu
Qualifications
Ph.D., Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin
M.A., Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin
B.A., Computer Science, University of Wisconsin
3 years experience as a professional software engineer.
Research Areas
Online deliberation, reasoning, expression effects, political communication, journalism, and epistemic political efficacy.
Research
I'm interested in how communication affects the quality of collective decisions in democracies of all sizes, from small groups to democratic organizations to whole societies. My research is quantitative, usually experimental, and emphasizes development of measures with clear normative implications, so that research can lead to recommendations for improving society. Specifically, I study:
- Negative effects of overly neutral journalism, particularly on audience members' epistemic political efficacy (EPE), which is their confidence in their ability to determine the truth in politics. Low EPE may lead to tuning out or to tuning in in ways that disregard factual reality, such as an acceptance of dishonest campaigning.
- Political reasoning in general: measuring reasoning as cognitive processing, effects of framing and reason-content in received messages on message receivers, and effects of sending messages containing reasons on the message sender.
- Designing more structured forums for online deliberation to address the problem of scale, allowing more people to put their heads together to make decisions democratically. As a former professional software engineer, I see the internet as an opportunity to design communication systems with theoretically ideal properties, instead of as a fixed medium to be studied like past new media.
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