🤖 Must-Read Articles 🤖

Experimental Feature

Even just looking backwards a week, there are a lot more articles published than most of us could hope to read. We can always skim the titles and abstracts ourselves, but I wanted to test out some automation. The articles below, all of which can be found elsewhere on this site among other new publications, were chosen by Google Gemini Flash Thinking as "must-read" articles. The proper criteria are in the eyes of the beholder and Gemini doesn't apply my criteria without error. I may continue to refine the prompting based on experience and feedback. Like the rest of the site, this will update daily!

Breaking—or Embracing—the Mold: Examining the Influence of Stereotypical News Frames on the Perceptions of a Female Presidential Candidate
Communication Studies
Austin Y. Hubner, Calvin Coker
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The Effects of Metacognition on Senders’ Feedback Effect in Computer-Mediated Communication
Communication Studies
Duy Tyler Pham, Brandon Van Der Heide, Rui Zhu, Bobbie Rathjens
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Implications of gender metastereotypes for addressing sexist behavior
Human Communication Research
Craig Fowler, Jessica Gasiorek, Andrea Zorn, Sophie Stone
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Women often experience competence questioning communication (CQC), in which their contributions are overlooked or credit is misdirected to a male colleague. We examine whether gender metastereotypes—the stereotypes that women believe men hold of women, and the stereotypes men believe women hold of men—predict responses to sexism in the workplace. Specifically, through vignette-based experiments, we examine whether women’s and men’s willingness to directly confront male perpetrators of CQC, and men’s willingness to amplify the voice of female colleagues is affected by the activation of gender metastereotypes. For both women and men, positive metastereotypes directly predicted willingness to confront sexism, but, as theorized, only when individuals believed that the stereotypes held of their ingroup were held of them personally. We also found significant indirect effects of metastereotype activation on willingness to address sexism via felt responsibility for addressing sexism (for women) and concern for the group image (for men).
Illuminating the relative dominance of awareness and pervasiveness over visibility in organizational ICT affordances
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Ward van Zoonen, Ronald Rice, Anu Sivunen
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Contemporary discourse on the affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs) has largely been captivated by the allure of visibility. This article challenges that glare by elucidating the overlooked yet pivotal roles of a set of other organizational ICT affordances. Through a dominance analysis, our findings illuminate that awareness—the capacity of ICTs to link information and actors in an ongoing digital tapestry—and pervasiveness—the widespread nature, across time and space, of digital content and interactions—hold greater explanatory power compared to visibility in understanding some types of interactions fostered by ICTs (communication frequency, information-sharing quality at work [within and across departments], and identity processes [departmental and organizational]). By spotlighting the explanatory strength of affordances such as awareness and pervasiveness and somewhat dimming the role of visibility, this study urges scholars and practitioners alike to broaden their focus on the affordances of media in the digital workplace.
Adolescents’ perceptions regarding their smartphone use: longitudinal relationships between perceived digital well-being and self-esteem
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Jasmina RosiÄŤ, Lara Schreurs, Laura Vandenbosch
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Adolescents perceive that they have digital well-being when smartphone use benefits outweigh the drawbacks in the social, cognitive, and emotional domains. Perceptions of digital well-being play a role in digital media effects, yet have received little research attention. This 1-year, three-wave panel study among 1,081 Slovenian adolescents investigated the reciprocal relationships between perceived digital well-being and self-esteem, with gender, parental education, and smartphone screen time as moderators. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models demonstrated a significant positive between-person relationship between perceived digital well-being in the emotional domain and self-esteem, but not for the social and cognitive domains. A positive, inconsistent within-person, cross-lagged relationship occurred between self-esteem and perceived digital well-being in the cognitive domain. Unstable differences occurred in the links between gender and the social domain and between smartphone screen time and the cognitive domain. These findings offer new insights into the debate on the effects of smartphone use.
Does following or engaging in online discussions trigger political participation? Results of two online experiments
Journal of Information Technology & Politics
Carina Weinmann, Ole Kelm, Stefan Marschall, Gerhard Vowe
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Time to politicization: the emergence and effects of politics on science YouTube videos
Journal of Information Technology & Politics
Aspen Omapang, Breanna Green, Chao Yu, Roxana Muenster, Drew Margolin
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News #foryou on TikTok: A Digital Methods-Based Study
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Jonathan Hendrickx
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TikTok is rapidly establishing itself as an important platform for contemporary digital journalism but explorations on its transnational journalistic usage thus far remain limited in size and scope. Hence, this explorative study adopts a digital methods approach to collect and assess 26,473 TikTok videos posted by 91 European news outlets between 2019 and 2022. Rooted conceptually in affordance and hybridity theory and methodologically in digital methods, the study theorizes digital production trends by drawing on a proposed typology of visual, hashtags, and auditory affordances. News outlets studied adhere to visual and hashtag affordances, but much less so to auditory ones.
How the Engagement Journalism Movement Is Changing Political News Content: An Applied-Research Study
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Sue Robinson, Margarita Orozco, Joshua P. Darr
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Our multi-methodological, multi-university team was hired to evaluate whether news outlets participating in substantive training in journalism engagement and solutions-oriented practices were also changing their content. Analyzing a large dataset of political stories published by these journalists, we employed both quantitative and qualitative techniques to find significant differences between 2018, 2020, and 2022 political coverage: fewer horse-race (game) framed stories, more content considered to be “engaged,” more transparent stories, and somewhat of a boost in solutions-oriented content. This work documents and measures these content changes, adding to a burgeoning body of scholarship about engagement and solutions journalism.
Exploring an Alternative Computational Approach for News Framing Analysis Through Community Detection in Framing Element Networks
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Yanru Jiang, Sha Lai, Lei Guo, Prakash Ishwar, Derry Wijaya, Margrit Betke
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This study introduces the “framing element” method, an alternative approach to computational news framing detection. Rooted in a constructionist framing analysis framework, it identifies frames as packages of framing elements, including actors (individuals and organizations) and topics, extending beyond topic-focused methods in prior unsupervised analyses. Compared with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)- and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based approaches on 1,300 U.S. gun violence news articles, this method addresses LDA’s limitations by focusing on high-level framing elements rather than keywords and is less labor-intensive than BERT-based supervised learning. Supporting both inductive and deductive analyses, it achieves comparable results to LDA while uncovering a previously unidentified gun violence frame.
Detecting Covid-19 Fake News on Twitter/X in French: Deceptive Writing Strategies
Media and Communication
Ming Ming Chiu, Alex Morakhovski, Zhan Wang, Jeong-Nam Kim
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Many who believed Covid-19 fake news eschewed vaccines, masks, and social distancing; got unnecessarily infected; and died. To detect such fake news, we follow deceptive writing theory and link French hedges and modals to validity. As hedges indicate uncertainty, fake news writers can use it to include falsehoods while shifting responsibility to the audience. Whereas <em>devoir</em> (must) emphasizes certainty and truth, <em>falloir </em>(should, need) implies truth but emphasizes external factors, allowing writers to shirk responsibility. <em>Pouvoir</em> (can) indicates possibility, making it less tied to truth or falsehood. We tested this model with 50,000 French tweets about Covid-19 during March–August 2020 via mixed response analysis. Tweets with hedges or the modal <em>falloir</em> were more likely than others to be false, those with <em>devoir</em> were more likely to be true, and those with <em>pouvoir </em>showed no clear link to truth. Tweets of users with verification, more followers, or fewer status updates were more likely to be true. These results extend deceptive writing theory and inform fake news detection algorithms and media literacy instruction.
Spreading False Content in Political Campaigns: Disinformation in the 2024 European Parliament Elections
Media and Communication
Andreu Casero-Ripollés, Laura Alonso-Muñoz, Diana Moret-Soler
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Electoral campaigns are one of the key moments of democracy. In recent times, the circulation of disinformation has increased during these periods. This phenomenon has serious consequences for democratic health since it can alter the behaviour and decisions of voters. This research aims to analyse the features of this phenomenon during the 2024 European Parliament elections in a comparative way. The applied methodology is based on quantitative content analysis. The sample (<em>N</em> = 278) comprises false information verified by 52 European fact-checking agencies about the campaign for the European elections in 20 EU countries. The analysis model includes variables such as time-period, country, propagator platform, topic, and the type of disinformation. The results show that the life cycle of electoral disinformation goes beyond the closing of the polls assuming a permanent nature. In addition, national environments condition the profiles of this question, which is more intense in Southern and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, although multiple channels are involved, digital platforms with weak ties are predominant in disseminating hoaxes. Finally, migration and electoral integrity are the predominant topics. This favours the circulation of an issue central to the far-right agenda and aims to discredit elections and their mechanisms to undermine democracy. These findings establish the profiles of this problem and generate knowledge to design public policies that combat electoral false content more effectively.
Reinforcing or Rethinking? What do News Consumers Want from Journalism in the Post-Truth Era?
Media and Communication
Martin Moland, Jacopo Custodi, Hans-Jörg Trenz
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Policymakers and news producers have long grappled with the challenges that fake news and misinformation pose to quality journalism. This has given rise to an extensive body of literature, covering various aspects from the characteristics of fake news to strategies for addressing it. However, the preferences of news consumers regarding the future of journalism and their views on how journalistic commitment to truth can best be maintained remain relatively overlooked in scholarly research. This article utilizes primary data from a survey (<em>N</em> = 4,521) fielded in Norway, Italy, and Poland in 2023 to show that, even in contemporary media environments, people continue to regard traditional journalistic ideals as the normative goals for future journalism. This suggests that journalists in an age of post-truth should focus less on rethinking journalism and more on adhering to its traditional goals of unbiased dissemination of facts.
Migrating a Flock of Outsiders: Platform Affordances and Political Goals in the Chilean Constitutional Reform
Political Communication
Karen Gheza, Marcelo Santos, Sebastián Rivera
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Bayesian reasoning for qualitative replication analysis: Examples from climate politics
Political Science Research and Methods
Tasha Fairfield, Andrew Charman
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This paper demonstrates how Bayesian reasoning can be used for an analog of replication analysis with qualitative research that conducts inference to best explanation. We overview the basic mechanics of Bayesian reasoning with qualitative evidence and apply our approach to recent research on climate change politics, a matter of major importance that is beginning to attract greater interest in the discipline. Our re-analysis of illustrative evidence from a prominent article on global collective-action versus distributive politics theories of climate policy largely accords with the authors’ conclusions, while illuminating the value added of Bayesian analysis. In contrast, our in-depth examination of scholarship on oil majors’ support for carbon pricing yields a Bayesian inference that diverges from the authors’ conclusions. These examples highlight the potential for Bayesian reasoning not only to improve inferences when working with qualitative evidence but also to enhance analytical transparency, facilitate communication of findings, and promote knowledge accumulation.
Understanding Avoidance of Political Discussions in an Autocratizing Society
International Journal of Public Opinion Research
Chun Hong Tse, Francis L F Lee
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People living in authoritarian or autocratizing societies may have to refrain from expressing their genuine political views to avoid troubles. Besides preference falsification, some may simply refrain from engaging in political expressions and discussions. This study aims at understanding avoidance of political discussions in an autocratizing society. It posits perceptions of legal and social risks, political frustration, political orientation, and secondary control as possible predictors of avoidance of political discussions. A survey of citizens in post-National Security Law Hong Kong shows that pro-democracy citizens in Hong Kong are more likely to perceive the presence of social and legal risks. They are also more likely to feel frustrated by the political environment. Perceived social risks significantly predict avoidance of political discussions, and the relationship is stronger among people with higher levels of secondary control. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Perceived underrepresentation and populist voting
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Fernando Feitosa, Jean-Benoît Pilet, David Talukder
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When voting is not enough: the relationship between ideological incongruence, party attachment, and protest behavior
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Yasemin Tosun
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Extreme recall: which politicians come to mind?
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties
Gaurav Sood, Daniel Weitzel
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Automated Detection of Media Bias Using Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing: A Systematic Review
Social Science Computer Review
Mar Castillo-Campos, David Becerra-Alonso, Hajo G. Boomgaarden
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Media bias has long been a subject of scholarly interest due to its potential to shape public perceptions and behaviors. This systematic review leverages advances in natural language processing (NLP) to explore automated methods to detect media bias, addressing five core questions: it examines the definitions and operationalization of media bias, explores the NLP tasks addressed for its detection, the technologies used, and their respective outcomes and applied findings. This review also examines the practical applications of these methodologies and assesses the patterns, implications, and limitations associated with using artificial intelligence for media bias detection. Analyzing peer-reviewed articles from 2019 to 2023, the review initially identified 519 articles, which ultimately included 28 relevant ones. Significant heterogeneity is observed in bias definitions, affecting the analysis and detection approaches. The review highlights the predominant use of some methods and identifies challenges such as inconsistencies in problem definition, outcome measurement, and comparative method evaluation. Regardless of the conceptualizations of bias and the methods used, studies consistently identify bias in media outlets. Thus, studying media bias remains necessary for raising awareness and detection, and NLP methods are significant allies in this endeavor. This research aims to consolidate the foundations of recent advances in NLP for bias detection, encouraging researchers to focus on developing transparent, task-specific tools and work toward a consensus on a technical definition of bias and standardized metrics for its evaluation.
How Not to Fool Ourselves About Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
Paul T. von Hippel, Brendan A. Schuetze
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Researchers across many fields have called for greater attention to heterogeneity of treatment effects—shifting focus from the average effect to variation in effects between different treatments, studies, or subgroups. True heterogeneity is important, but many reports of heterogeneity have proved to be false, nonreplicable, or overestimated. In this review, we catalog ways that past researchers fooled themselves about heterogeneity and recommend ways that we, as researchers, can stop fooling ourselves about heterogeneity in the future. We make 18 specific recommendations. The most common themes are to (a) seek heterogeneity only when the mechanism offers clear motivation and the data offer adequate power, (b) shy away from seeking “no-but” heterogeneity when there is no main effect, (c) separate the noise of estimation error from the signal of true heterogeneity, (d) shrink variation in estimates toward zero, (e) increase p values and widen confidence intervals when conducting multiple tests, (f) estimate interactions rather than subgroup effects, and (g) check whether findings of heterogeneity are sensitive to changes in model or measurement. We also resolve long-standing debates about centering interactions in linear models and estimating interactions in nonlinear models, such as logistic, ordinal, and interval regression. If researchers follow these recommendations, the search for heterogeneity should yield more trustworthy results in the future.
The simulation-cum-ROC approach: A new approach to generate tailored cutoffs for fit indices through simulation and ROC analysis
Behavior Research Methods
Katharina Groskurth, Nivedita Bhaktha, Clemens M. Lechner
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To evaluate model fit in structural equation modeling, researchers commonly compare fit indices against fixed cutoff values (e.g., CFI ≥ .950). However, methodologists have cautioned against overgeneralizing cutoffs, highlighting that cutoffs permit valid judgments of model fit only in empirical settings similar to the simulation scenarios from which these cutoffs originate. This is because fit indices are not only sensitive to misspecification but are also susceptible to various model, estimation, and data characteristics. As a solution, methodologists have proposed four principal approaches to obtain so-called tailored cutoffs, which are generated specifically for a given setting. Here, we review these approaches. We find that none of these approaches provides guidelines on which fit index (out of all fit indices of interest) is best suited for evaluating whether the model fits the data in the setting of interest. Therefore, we propose a novel approach combining a Monte Carlo simulation with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. This so-called simulation-cum-ROC approach generates tailored cutoffs and additionally identifies the most reliable fit indices in the setting of interest. We provide R code and a Shiny app for an easy implementation of the approach. No prior knowledge of Monte Carlo simulations or ROC analysis is needed to generate tailored cutoffs with the simulation-cum-ROC approach.
The use of large language models for qualitative research: The Deep Computational Text Analyser (DECOTA).
Psychological Methods
Lois Player, Ryan Hughes, Kaloyan Mitev, Lorraine Whitmarsh, Christina Demski, Nicholas Nash, Trisevgeni Papakonstantinou, Mark Wilson
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Zero inflation in intensive longitudinal data: Why is it important and how should we deal with it?
Psychological Methods
Sijing (S. J. ) Shao, Ziqian Xu, Qimin Liu, Kenneth McClure, Ross Jacobucci, Scott E. Maxwell, Zhiyong Zhang
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Online Nonprobability Samples
Annual Review of Sociology
Jeremy Freese, Olivia Jin
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Online nonprobability samples provide social scientists with opportunities to conduct surveys and experiments on large, diverse samples at modest prices. Researchers may find bewildering the options offered by the many commercial entities that provide research participants, and our review seeks to orient researchers to key issues about their use. We discuss principles and evidence regarding estimates from nonprobability samples versus those from probability samples. We also describe methods for addressing certain types of problem participants that one encounters in these samples: professional respondents, participants who are inattentive or have low linguistic competence, and bogus participants (increasingly in the form of bots). We urge researchers not to take data quality for granted, not to rely on indirect information to vouch for data quality, and to proactively build methods that allow for the evaluation of data quality into their instruments.