Books
How Generations Polarize (in progress)
This Carnegie-funded project, “How Generations Polarize: Understanding Age-Structured Polarization and the Future of Democratic Resilience,” reframes polarization as generationally distinct. Older adults display greater partisan polarization, while younger adults are more likely to demonstrate anti-system attitudes and weaker democratic commitment. Using a variety of data, the project explains why polarization’s effects differ across ages and designs tailored interventions to strengthen democratic resilience and reduce polarization among both younger and older Americans.
Misinformation and the Aging American — Oxford University Press, 2026.
Why do older adults engage more with misinformation online, even when they often identify falsehoods correctly in surveys? I investigate this paradox using a host of survey experiments and behavioral trace data. Analyses across multiple nationally representative samples show that older Americans disproportionately consume and share low-credibility political and health content – but not due to simple cognitive decline or inability to detect false claims. Rather, this gap emerges from contextual and motivational factors. Older adults possess relatively high news literacy and cognitive reflectiveness, yet these traits do not reliably predict real-world sharing behavior. Instead, high political interest and strong partisan identity contribute to a heightened tendency to trust and share politically congruent misinformation, and smaller, more like-minded social networks incentivize sharing it. Importantly, the media ecosystem older adults inhabit is asymmetrically skewed: most dubious online content leans right, intensifying engagement especially among older conservatives. This asymmetry helps explain why discernment ability appears high in controlled experiments with balanced content but breaks down in naturalistic settings. The book extends these findings to health misinformation and video-based platforms to show that engagement patterns generalize across domains and modalities, suggesting an underlying preference for clickbait among these consumers.
Ultimately, Misinformation and the Aging American argues that the age-misinformation relationship is less about cognitive vulnerability than about complex interactions between identity, social context, and the media environment. Mitigation efforts, therefore, must address not only skills but also supply structures, audience demand, and social media dynamics that shape behavior in later life.
Selected talks overviewing the book’s findings:
The Power of the Crowd — Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Co-authored with Florian Stöckel, Sabrina Stöckli, Hannah Kroker, and Jason Reifler.
This Element explores misinformation as a challenge for democracies. It uses experiments from Germany, Italy, and the UK to assess the role of user-generated corrections on social media. Results show that corrections reduce perceived accuracy of misinformation, but miscorrections can harm perceptions of true news. The Element examines mechanisms of social corrections, finding evidence for recency effects rather than systematic processing. The conclusion highlights best practices for effective corrections.