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 is not big, shiny heroes. 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.
Social science fiction
I recently started writing fiction to bring this same social science perspective to readers who would never pick up an academic journal. I've fallen in love with it all: the writing process, the characters, the worldbuilding. My first novel, The Windweaver Code, is a fantasy adventure with themes of misunderstood history, well-intentioned harm, tragic cycles, and systemic problems that require more than heroes defeating villains. It's complete but not available yet--I'm seeking a literary agent.
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