My work is pretty interdisciplinary. Most of it sits at the intersection of political polarization, misinformation, behavior, and just broadly speaking, the media environment and how that shapes what people think about and do politically. 

A lot of my earlier work focused on misinformation, especially relating to scientific issues. During my postdoc at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, we were interested in studying vaccines. The postdoc was from 2018 to 2020. At the time, we thought the biggest problem, vaccine-wise, was declining coverage of MMR vaccines. At that point, we were experiencing the biggest outbreak of measles in the U.S. in a quarter of a century, mostly in little pockets in places like New York City and in the Pacific Northwest. We were really trying to understand vaccine hesitancy and why people don't vaccinate their kids. 

As we were designing these instruments and fielding those studies, 2020 and the COVID pandemic came along. I didn't really intend to spend as much time as I did on vaccine hesitancy, but it became such a prevalent issue. We shifted a lot of our focus from MMR to COVID. It became one big slice of my work: understanding misinformation around vaccination and what can be done about that. I’m still working in that space, partly because it continues to be relevant (see the current measles outbreaks, which dwarf the ones from 2019). 

A lot of my other work focuses on polarization and the media's potential relationship with misinformation. How did we get to be so polarized in the United States and kind of what role, if any, did the media play? A lot of my dissertation was on this, and I'm still trying to understand the information environment. We live in interesting times where the traditional media gatekeepers are gone and the way people consume information is just very different than what it used to be even ten years ago.

One of my big projects on this front looks at podcasting as a space where people obtain information. I have done some research trying to understand the audience of the biggest podcast, which is The Joe Rogan Experience. I'm working with some collaborators on mapping the podcasting space. Podcasts are interesting in the sense that they're not like traditional media. They’re personal in nature, right? You listen because you like the host for all kinds of reasons. 

Frequently, podcasts have nothing to do with politics. The shows you might tune into, like Joe Rogan, for example – it's not classified as a political show. It’s culture, MMA, comedy, but it's not labeled as politics. But a lot of these shows still talk a lot about politics. Part of what I'm trying to do in my work is see the degree to which politics creeps into these non-explicitly political spaces. 

It matters because those are personal relationships you have with those people. On the one hand, we have all these decreasing attention spans, but then on the other, people are listening to three-plus hours of podcast episodes. Most of these podcasts are not really about politics, but when they do talk about politics, your partisan guards are down. I think that has persuasive power. 

Another focus on my work is trying to leverage sports and shared identities we have as sports fans in order to depolarize people. My collaborator Matt Levendusky and I brought people together for these structured discussions, and we found that when you actually have a meaningful conversation with people from across the political aisle, that tends to lower the partisan temperature.

Of course, the question then becomes: Okay, so what? That's cool, but how do we do this at scale? How do we make people want to have these conversations?  Increasingly, we're polarized on a lot of things: We don't like the same music, we don't experience the same movies and TV shows necessarily. It’s a very fragmented landscape. But one last vestige of this big national culture we have is sports. When you look at the most-watched television broadcasts, every year for the past ten years, out of the top 50 broadcasts, I think 48 are sports, mostly football.

So while we might all be watching different shows and listening to different music, we have a lot of shared identities in sports culture. Is there a way to leverage this to bring about that contact and have people meaningfully interact – and have that be a way in which we can lower the partisan temperature? 

Exactly. And I think that actually matters for podcasts, too. Podcasts are different from cable, because on cable, you're going to go on, you're going to tune in, and there's going to be talking heads that are brought in to yell at each other for 3 to 4 minutes. But podcasts are long, and it produces a very different environment. When Ezra Klein interviews somebody, they have a meaningful conversation for over an hour. The length of time just shapes the conversation in a way that doesn't really happen in other media.

We published a paper about how vaccine hesitancy spills over into pet owners, specifically dog owners. People who are vaccine-hesitant also don't stay up-to-date on their dog vaccines, mostly the rabies vaccine. That actually made it onto SNL’s Weekend Update. That's probably the most fun thing that happened with my work. It was the only paper I ever published that was actually talked about by Michael Che! 

In terms of podcasts, essentially, there's a lot of politics on shows that aren't explicitly political, and I think that matters. Politicians are getting a sense for it, too. In the last election, Kamala Harris went on “Call Her Daddy”; Trump went on Theo Von and Joe Rogan. They're clearly recognizing that there's something there. 

As part of data collection for the book, we're trying to talk to the hosts of relatively large but still pretty niche podcasts. There’s a guy who's been doing this podcast about national parks, and he talks a lot about politics now because of all the political stuff that's happening with the parks. It’s just interesting to learn more about this space from those people directly.

Obviously the primary goal is always to get to get a good publication, because that's the currency in academia. But we put a lot of work into these projects, and to me, having them result in a book or a PDF on a gated journal website that not many people will read is not enough. I always try to translate my work for a broader audience. If I have something interesting to say based on my research that relates to current events, I try to write an op-ed or something public-facing. I try to be engaged in other ways.

This past semester, I did a talk on misinformation at the Columbus Science Pub. The more famous version of it is called “Lectures on Tap.” Essentially, interested people just come and listen to a fun, not super-academic presentation and just have a conversation about a topic. It's meant to be for a general audience. When a public library invites me to speak, I try to do that, as well.

Public engagement is important, especially for those of us at places like Ohio State, or other land-grant institutions. Ultimately, a lot of our research is a result of big grants that are taxpayer funded. I try to make it so that whatever the findings are, they are available to anybody who might be interested. 

It’s not always easy, and it's not always valued, necessarily. But I think it matters. I think if you spend a lot of time on something, it shouldn't just sit on a journal website behind a paywall. If your research actually helps to inform something that's going on, you should try to make an effort to put it out there. 

I'm working on getting a book contract for the podcast work. We’re also trying to get some grant support for the sports research. 

I'm a political scientist in a school of communication. I publish in political science journals and in communication journals, but also in public health journals and in psychology journals. My work has always been at this interdisciplinary intersection, and so having a space where you can actually bounce ideas off of people who are coming at the same exact problems from a slightly different angle is something that I appreciate, and it's always useful to clarify my thinking. 

Every field needs its own terminology, but frequently we're talking about the same topics. I think a group like this is useful because it sheds light on the fact that my slice of the literature isn't everything that's been written on polarization and misinformation. Getting more perspectives is useful.
 

The conversation above has been edited for brevity and clarity.