Faculty

My research centers around ways our "national discussion" is broken and a search for points of leverage by which it could be made more constructive, civil, substantive, and grounded in reality. Modern societies face increasingly urgent and complex problems, but modern political media content seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with ever-shorter sound-bites, increasingly absolutist ideology, demonization of opponents, and cynical distortions going unchecked by news outlets that are either too understaffed to fact-check or too cowed by partisan bias accusations to do their job of keeping the discussion honest. We can do better. Academic research can and should help us figure out how. Of course, it's possible that nobody outside of academia will listen to us, but that's no excuse not to do our part.  

Research areas:

• Effects of exposure to passive, "he said / she said" news versus news that actively adjudicates factual disputes. Journalism has in recent decades become much more passive, meaning more likely to treat factual disputes like entirely subjective disagreements by stopping at a balanced presentation of incompatible factual claims even when credible evidence is available that strongly supports only one side.  Despite being a common criticism of modern journalism, effects of such passivity on audiences had not been tested in experimental research prior to three studies I led.  All three studies found that passive news can make interested readers less confident that they can determine the truth about political facts in general, not just about the specific facts in the passive news story they just read.  This general lack of confidence about the attainability of truth in politics is measured using a construct I developed called epistemic political efficacy (EPE). Low EPE may lead to tuning out or to tuning in in ways that disregard factual reality, such as an acceptance of dishonest campaigning. 
• Effects of exposure to media criticism. Media criticism is increasingly common in the media, but we know little about the effects of exposure to this content.  Does sophisticated media criticism make people more sophisticated media consumers, or does the sophistication of the criticism not matter, with all forms of criticism resulting in generalized cynicism and distrust of media?  Some of my favorite examples of sophisticated media criticism come from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (e.g. this video criticizing overly balanced news, or this video on game framing and sensationalism).  I'm using clips like these as experimental stimuli in an emerging area of my research that examines effects of media criticism on media trust.  This research aims to develop new measures of media trust that distinguish the kinds of trust that sophisticated citizens ought to have (e.g. trust in professional newsrooms to limit the influence of reporters' personal partisan leanings) from those that would indicate media illiteracy (e.g. trust that coverage choices are based largely on anyone's judgments about the relative importance of underlying issues). 
• Various research related to political reasoning.  Recent democratic theory argues for a shift in emphasis toward reasons and away from mere facts, which of course can be useless trivia.  A reason is simply a fact plus an evaluative implication, meaning anything that allows it to be weighed on one side or another of some evaluation or choice.  Empirical research is just beginning to respond to this shift in democratic theory.  My work in this area includes effects of game framed news on whether audiences spontaneously choose to reason (including an effort to distinguish a measure of spontaneous reasoning from past measures of the number of reasons in memory), media gatekeeping trust as a predictor of spontaneous reasoning about the relative importance of issues, and effects of composing messages containing reasons on the message creator. 
• Large-scale online deliberation.  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.

Selected publications:

• Pingree, R. J., Scholl, R. M., & Quenette, A. M. (in press).  Effects of post-debate coverage on spontaneous policy reasoning.  In press at Journal of Communication. 
• Pingree, R. J. (2011).  Effects of unresolved factual disputes in the news on epistemic political efficacy.  Journal of Communication, 61, 22-47.
• Pingree, R. J. (2007).  How messages affect their senders: A more general model of message effects and implications for deliberation. Communication Theory, 17, 439-461.
• Pingree, R. J. (2006).  Decision structure and the problem of scale in deliberation. Communication Theory, 16, 198-222.