How do people react to information that challenges their party's policies? While most of the existing literature focuses on possible changes in issue opinions, we know less about other implicit and explicit ways in which people may contend with counter-attitudinal information. In an online experiment in India, I present participants with potentially incongruent information about a controversial economic policy and ask them to evaluate the quality of this information. Strong party supporters (non-supporters) feel that an article that criticizes (praises) the policy is of very poor quality. Further, people are much more likely to ignore the biased nature of an article if it reinforces their priors – but complain if it does not. Yet, although I observe strong affective reactions against information that is counter-attitudinal, there is no evidence of opinion backlash; instead, there is (weak) evidence of people updating in the direction of incongruent information. These findings reinforce the importance of studying reactions to counter-attitudinal information above and beyond issue-specific opinions.
Reducing Prejudice and Support for Religious Nationalism Through Conversations on WhatsApp
Winner of the MPSA Best Paper Award (2024), the MPSA Best Paper in Political Behavior Award (2024), and the APSA Experimental Research Section Best Paper Award (2023); Honorable Mention for the APSA Comparative Politics Section Sage Best Paper Award (2023) and the APSA Religion and Politics Section Weber Best Conference Paper Award (2023)
Can online conversations with a marginalized outgroup member improve majority group members' attitudes about that outgroup? While the intergroup contact literature provides insights about the effects of extended interactions between groups, less is known about how relatively short and casual conversations may play out in highly polarized settings, or how conversation topic can affect outcomes. In an experiment in India, I bring together Hindus and Muslims for five days of conversations on WhatsApp, a popular messaging platform, to investigate the extent to which chatting with a Muslim about randomly assigned discussion prompts affects Hindus' perceptions of Muslims and approval for mainstream religious nationalist statements. I find that intergroup conversations greatly reduce prejudice against Muslims and approval for religious nationalist statements at least two to three weeks post-conversation. Intergroup conversations about non-political issues are especially effective at reducing prejudice, while conversations about politics substantially decrease support for religious nationalism. I further show that political conversations and non-political conversations affect attitudes through distinct mechanisms, and that conversations also reduce discrimination against Muslims in two behavioral activities.
Misinformation Beyond Traditional Feeds: Evidence from a WhatsApp Deactivation Experiment in Brazil
(with Tiago Ventura, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker) The Journal of Politics[Journal Link][VoxDev]
Winner of the APSA Political Communication Section Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award (2024), the APSA Information Technology & Politics Section Best Paper Award (2024), and the Brazilian Political Science Association Best Paper Award (2024)
In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are typically associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment to test the impact of reducing exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this intervention significantly reduced participants' recall of false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term change in the information environment did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy, political polarization, or well-being.
Reaching Across the Political Aisle: Overcoming Challenges in Using Social Media for Recruiting Politically Diverse Respondents
(with Maggie Macdonald et al.) International Journal of Social Research Methodology[Journal Link]
A challenge for survey research is achieving representativeness across demographic groups. We test the extent to which ideological alignment with a survey's sponsor shapes differential partisan response and individuals' decision to participate in a research study on Facebook. While the use of Facebook advertisements for recruitment has increased in recent years and offers benefits, it can present difficulties in obtaining politically representative samples. We recruit respondents for a survey through two otherwise-identical advertisements associated with either New York University (from a liberal state) or the University of Mississippi (from a conservative state). Contrary to expectations, we do not find an asymmetry in completion rates between self-reported Democrats and Republicans based on the survey sponsor, nor do we find statistically significant differences in attitudes of respondents across the two sponsors when we control for observables. We discuss implications for social media recruitment strategies to enhance the representativeness of online survey samples.
Working Papers
Citizen Reactions to Religious Nationalist Rhetoric
Paper available upon request.
When and why do citizens express support for extreme violence by their governments? This paper examines how majority group citizens react to different justifications of state-sponsored violence against a marginalized minority group. Using a survey experiment in India, I show that vague and illogical justifications (such as "whataboutisms" referring to other incidents of violence or appeals to simply trust authority figures) effectively increase Hindus' levels of support for government demolitions of property belonging to Muslims. The results challenge the conventional view that stronger arguments are more persuasive; rather, citizens are more swayed by weak arguments, despite explicitly acknowledging their flaws when asked about the reasoning. I argue that justifications do not work because they persuasively promote the merits of demolitions, but because they raise the salience of other factors such as historical grievances. This study helps explain how adverse policies can easily gain popular support and provides insights on how different rhetorical strategies that voters are regularly exposed to actually operate.
Reducing Social Media Usage During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country WhatsApp Experiment
(with Tiago Ventura, Shelley Liu, Carolina Torreblanca, and Joshua A. Tucker) Paper available upon request.
Winner of the MPSA Best Paper in Political Behavior Award (2026)
Messaging platforms like WhatsApp are central to communication around the world, but also a major hub for misinformation and toxic content. We deploy online field experiments in Brazil, India, and South Africa to examine how restricting the use of WhatsApp affects information exposure, political attitudes, and individual well-being. We incentivize participants to either (1) stop consuming multimedia content on WhatsApp or (2) limit overall WhatsApp usage to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of each country's elections. We find that our interventions significantly reduced participants' exposure to misinformation, online toxicity, and uncivil discussions about politics — but at the expense of keeping up with true political news. Using a wide range of measures, we detected no changes to political attitudes, but uncovered substantial gains to individual well-being as treated participants substituted WhatsApp usage for other activities. Results highlight the complex trade-offs associated with the effects of social media use on information consumption and its downstream effects.
Non-WEIRD Political Ideology: Theory and Evidence from India
Does political ideology matter in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries? If so, around which issues is it structured, why, and what can we learn from its study? We investigate these questions in India, where as in many other developing countries, scholars have traditionally explained politics as a contestation over material resources rather than ideas. We argue for more attention to the role of ideas in such contexts, and we theorize that ideological divides in India will be salient, structured around long-standing debates, and that the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will hold an outsized role in shaping the terms and focus of disagreement. We find support for our theory in two nationally representative surveys with embedded endorsement experiments, one conducted online (N=2,393) and another over the phone via random-digit dialing (N=1,255). Specifically, we observe that respondents can be placed along a single ideological dimension centered around BJP-owned Hindu nationalist issues, that the same issues have long characterized ideological cleavages, and that one's placement predicts a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes. We also find that feelings toward the BJP are particularly predictive of ideological placement and that endorsements from BJP politicians are especially influential, especially for Hindu nationalist issues. Finally, we observe support for the notion that the political left is marginalized in contemporary India. Our results indicate that ideology is consequential for Indian politics and may differ in important ways from the West, and call for greater attention to the study of ideology in developing country contexts.
Perceptions of Group Norms and Conformism in Preferences for Exclusion in India
Is support for anti-minority policies and rhetoric shaped by the perception that coethnics favor minority exclusion? Through a pair of survey experiments, we find that Hindu respondents in India perceive other Hindus to be far more exclusionary towards minorities than they are themselves. We also find strong evidence of conformism to perceived public opinion. When presented with information about majority public opinion, respondents update their beliefs in the direction of the information provided, regardless of whether it portrays others as exclusionary or inclusionary. Indeed, mere reference of the religious ingroup is sufficient to produce conformism: when respondents are asked to think about other Hindus' opinions about an issue, they express individual opinions that are significantly closer to the perceived majority opinion than otherwise. Elucidating these patterns contributes to our understanding of how distortions of public opinion can shape individual preferences about minority exclusion.