Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award

Prof. Wojcieszak has won a Facebook Research Award for her proposal “How to Attenuate Selective Exposure and Affective Polarization”

Prof. Wojcieszak has won a Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award of $100,000 for her proposal “How to Attenuate Selective Exposure and Affective Polarization: A Multinational Survey Experiments combined with Web Tracking Data.” Lowering Selectivity & Polarization: 3-Country Experiments and Web Tracking

She will work with her international team (in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands) to not only test the patterns of affective polarization in these three distinct countries, but also to validate several novel measures of affective polarization that can be used in comparative work. This will be done by relying on advanced methods mixing overtime panel surveys, survey experiments, voluntarily shared trace online browsing data (using a piloted and open-source browser extension developed by one of the team members), and traditional experiments. Moreover, this project proposes two specific interventions that can attenuate polarization, enhancing understanding and respect between different citizens. The results are directly applicable: the interventions can be easily implemented on social media platforms (growing sources of news, Gottfried and Shearer 2016), either by the platforms themselves or by organizations running campaigns and/or advertisement in them; strengthening the democratic values and respect among these platforms’ users.

This grant is embedded within Prof. Wojcieszak’s ongoing ERC Starting Grant, funded by the European Union and hosted at the University of Amsterdam.

For recent publications from Prof. Wojcieszak that deal with selective exposure online, see:

The most recent 2019 article examines the drives of media use in Iran thus extending selective exposure theory to authoritarian regimes? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1940161218808372?casa_token=zJmCqjmwY84AAAAA:MQl6AMt-XJitDsbNt77kS9z8cWkgBCiOsb8YCmJoNJoT_R1_cMrUiJUOmSKoovJwDpntd7k-naK3dQ

Two other pieces published in the second half of 2018 address the methodological challenges studying selective exposure https://academic.oup.com/hcr/article-abstract/45/1/27/5113026 , individual characteristics that predict selectivity https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08838151.2017.1375502, as well as the factors that can minimize or enhance the selection of like-minded political content https://academic.oup.com/hcr/article-abstract/44/3/247/4956827?redirectedFrom=fulltext

She has also published a book review of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age in International Journal of Press and Politics: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1940161218808375

See here https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=eiPR5agAAAAJ&view_op=list_works