Associate professor @UofUComm. Associate member @huntsmancancer. Associate editor @MisinfoReview. Just generally an associate.
slc
Joined May 2020
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Honored to be among this cohort. The fellowship will support my research on how the partisan loyalty of older adults and institutional distrust among younger adults create different paths to polarization, with the goal of developing age-specific solutions. #CarnegieFellows
Announcing the 2026 Andrew #CarnegieFellows! Selected from a record 381 nominations, 24 fellows will each receive $200K to examine the causes of political polarization — and how to reduce it.
🔗Read more: carnegie.org/news/articles/2…
#Polarization #Research
Ben Lyons retweeted
Importantly, upstream definitional choices fundamentally alter the downstream audience demographics. "Network Importance" influencers reach significantly older, whiter audiences, while Follower and engagement-based definitions yield significantly younger audiences.
ALT Audience demographics and partisanship across influencer definitions. Median influencer and central 50% of influencers (y-axis) are compared across six prominent influencer definitions (x-axis) in terms of (A) audience average age, (B) percent of female followers, (C) percent of White followers, and (D) percent of Republican followers. Dashed horizontal lines designate panel statistics.
Ben Lyons retweeted
🚨New paper🚨out in @SocMedSoc w/ John Wagner and @jennifer_oser 🎉
We all know who's a political influencer on social media, right? Well... we may THINK we do, but what we're actually measuring is very different. How different? 🧵👇
Ben Lyons retweeted
My last 18 reviews of first-round manuscripts:
-All 6 preregistered studies had undisclosed deviations
-9 of 18 had notable technical errors
-Last two were substantially AI-written
11 of 18 (61%) had one.
Editors: my coauthors and I can help you develop a pipeline to fix this!
Ben Lyons retweeted
Probably one of the 3 most important articles this year
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Ben Lyons retweeted
"the age-misinformation relationship is less about cognitive vulnerability than about complex interactions between identity, social context, and the media environment"
Misinformation and the Aging American: The Paradox of Engagement and Truth Discernment - new book forthcoming from my excellent coauthor @ba_lyons amazon.com/Misinformation-Ag…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Misinformation and the Aging American: The Paradox of Engagement and Truth Discernment - new book forthcoming from my excellent coauthor @ba_lyons amazon.com/Misinformation-Ag…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Impressive @ThadKousser @namalhotra et al. field experiment had few effects on election attitudes of TX conservatives despite exposure to "an average of 20 online videos, 18.5 cable TV videos, 23.9 display ads, 3 text messages & 3 postcards" - high-quality content crafted by pros
Ben Lyons retweeted
I grabbed enrollment data on the flagship universities in 12 Midwestern states.
Then I grabbed the data on every school in those states with a "direction" in their name.
Every flagship is larger in 2024 vs 2005.
14 of 17 directionals are smaller.
The median change in enrollment:
Flagships: +19%
Directionals: -29%
One week left to submit extended abstracts!
🚨 Special Issue @HCR_Journal cfp:
Who Are We Studying in Communication Research? Revisiting Audience in a Transforming Media Environment
Guest eds @YeSun_comm, Adrian Meier & me
Extended abstracts due Aug. 31
More info: academic.oup.com/hcr/pages/s…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Cruz et al show that low-quality online survey panels can generate replicable yet spurious education differences in acquiescence bias, and that attention checks alone may not fix them.
doi.org/10.1017/pan.2025.100…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Druckman et al show that affective polarization depends on whom surveys ask people to evaluate, what dimension they measure, how surveys are administered, and parties' political power. They argue that concepts and measures must be carefully matched.
doi.org/10.1111/pops.70152
Ben Lyons retweeted
Skytte samples 70 AP stories and tests cue/no-cue versions with 12,177 Americans, finding that real-news party cues move policy opinions toward one's party by just 3.3% of the scale, which smaller than effects from clearer, more artificial cues.
doi.org/10.1111/ajps.70014
Ben Lyons retweeted
🚨 New preprint 🚨 American affective polarization has risen for decades. But the people being averaged over — partisans — keep changing. I show that turnover in who holds a party label accounts for almost a third of the measured rise. 🧵
osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rv…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Searching beyond decrements: Attentional guidance across the adult lifespan
Review by Nir Shalev & Dominique Lamy
Free access before August 13: tinyurl.com/m733p8cs
Ben Lyons retweeted
🔔 Dr. Matthew VanDyke and Dr. Sara K. Yeo are looking to hire a Postdoctoral Civic Science Fellow. Please see the opportunity here: careers.ua.edu/jobs/postdoct…
Illinois rise up
Here is a plot of the total tornadoes by state as of 3 pm July 1. The numbers were obtained by the quality controlled tornado tracks in the Damage Assessment Toolkit database. #ILwx #tornadoes
Oh do I have a book for you. Misinformation and the aging American - coming in October from OUP global.oup.com/academic/prod…
Ben Lyons retweeted
Why do arguments often change people’s beliefs without changing their attitudes? In a new APSR with @PatrickPLiu and Scott Clifford, we point to belief relevance: arguments are more persuasive when they grapple with the idiosyncratic reasons people hold their political views.
Ben Lyons retweeted
Does affective polarization itself actually threaten democracy?
Recent experiments from the US suggest maybe not. In our new @EJPRjournal paper, we revisit this question comparatively with a survey experiment in 9 democracies (18,000 respondents). cup.org/4v72pej
