Communication, democracy, and me
I'm a quantitative communication researcher and a former professional software engineer. My research is on political communication, new media, and journalism, and aims to find points of leverage by which better communication could improve the quality of our democracy.
I'm a passionate believer in social science, as a set of methods, as a mindset, and as a way to make the world better. Understanding social systems is hard, a lot harder than people think. But it's possible. And that hard work must be done before we can really solve social problems. The solution to big problems isn't leaders, it's systems: how we communicate, how the powerful are held accountable or not, how we decide what to trust, how we prioritize, and how we learn or forget.
Fiction
I wrote a fantasy novel.
Growing up, I loved the feeling of wonder from stories of magic, but now I'm more likely to feel that way about a beautifully designed experiment, a precise conceptual distinction that matters, or a theory with important practical implications.
I started writing to try to bridge those two sources of wonder. The result is my first novel: Another Way to Hope. It's a found-family adventure about the different ways to find hope after trauma—both for individuals and for societies—and about what it takes to make progress on seemingly impossible societal problems. Spoiler alert: the answer isn't finding shiny heroes or defeating a dark lord. Comes out in fall 2026. More details and updates on this google group.
Research
- Restoring trust in truth seekers Experiments on how to restore trust in truth-seeking institutions like journalism, the justice system, science, and elections.
- Prioritizing problems better So many dysfunctions in how we set our agenda: reactivity, openness to manipulation by elites, lack of openness to good evidence of impact. But none of this is inevitable. It's not just human nature that makes our collective prioritization so dumb; it's rooted in correctable misperceptions of media.
- Fact checking Effects of fact checking, including effects on attitudes about the idea of truth in politics.
- Game framing What happens when media stops treating everything in politics as a game and takes policies seriously.
- Expression effects how messages affect their senders, and what this neglected other half of message effects means for our understanding of communication processes.
- Curriculum vitae
Contact
pingree@gmail.com