Josh Pasek

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Michigan

Anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic grew at an alarming rate, leaving much to understand about the relationship between people’s vaccination status and the information they were exposed to. This study investigated the relationship between vaccine behavior, decision rationales, and information exposure on social media over time. Usin...

Have perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court polarized, much like the rest of American politics? Because of the Court’s unique role, for many years, it remained one of the few institutions respected by both Democrats and Republicans alike. But the Court’s dramatic shift to the right in recent years—highlighted by its Dobbs decision in 2022—potentiall...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Among the more fraught election years in recent history, 2020 transpired amid four interlaced crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and uneven recovery, a racial reckoning, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and widespread belief among Republicans that the election had...

Researchers have long known that the terms used in questions posed to respondents shape the answers they give. Processes underlying these differences have generally been attributed to respondents’ interpretations of the questions (i.e., what do the terms lead them to focus on) and examined as a framing effect. Yet evidence that people often answer...

Americans who affiliate with both major political parties rapidly formed diverging attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic. Matters of scientific concern have elicited partisan reactions in the past, but partisan divergence of opinion on those issues occurred over decades rather than months. We review evidence on factors that led to polarization of p...

How do people form their attitudes toward complex policy issues? Although there has long been an assumption that people consider the various components of those issues and come to an overall assessment, a growing body of recent work has instead suggested that people may reach summary judgments as a function of heuristic cues and goal-oriented ratio...

Significance In communities that remain below the immunity threshold needed to blunt COVID-19’s spread, SARS-CoV-2 has a greater chance of mutating to evade vaccines. This study underscores the central role of trust and knowledge in increasing the likelihood of vaccinating. Trust in scientific institutions and spokespersons anchors time 1 vaccinati...

When U.S. presidential candidates misrepresent the facts, their claims get discussed across media streams, creating a lasting public impression. We show this through a public performance: the 2020 presidential debates. For every five newspaper articles related to the presidential candidates, President Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., there...

This is the fifth in a series of white papers providing a summary of the discussions and future directions that are derived from these topical meetings. This paper focuses on issues related to analysis and visual analytics. While these two topics are distinct, there are clear overlaps between the two. It is common to use different visualizations du...

In this paper, the fourth in a series of white papers, we provide a summary of the discussions and future directions that came from the topical meeting that focused on model construction with social media data. A particularly interesting aspect of this meeting was, in our view, discussion of the different disciplines’ requirements and approaches to...

The convergence of methods and relevant theories between computer scientists and social scientists is a necessary condition for leveraging social media data to understand this increasingly important window into human societies. This paper focuses on issues of data acquisition, sampling, and data preparation. These topics incorporate data collection...

Harnessing social media data for social science research entails creating measures out of the largely unstructured, noisy data that users generate on different platforms. This harnessing, particularly of data at scale, requires using methods developed in computer science. But it also typically requires integrating these methods with assessments of...

Political interest is a key predictor of likelihood to vote. We argue that the political interest–vote intention relationship can be explained by well-established theories that predict behavior across domains (e.g., theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior). Relying on the integrated behavioral model, we propose a core mediation model...

Following racially charged events, individuals often diverge in perceptions of what happened and how justice should be served. Examining data gathered shortly after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri alongside reactions to a novel officer-involved shooting, we unpack the processes by which racial divisions emerge. Even in a co...

This chapter examines one possible explanation for what social media data might be revealing; social media may well provide a window into public attention rather than attitudes and opinions. It describes an empirical test of the assumption that Twitter might provide a window into what Americans were thinking about in the run‐up to the 2016 US Presi...

Intersectionality theory allows us to examine how systems of power and oppression (e.g., racism, sexism) co-construct each other to create complex and unique forms of systemic harm and injustice. More particularly, intersectional invisibility provides a framework to understanding how Black women, who live at the intersection of racism and sexism, m...

Social media provides a rich amount of data on the everyday lives, opinions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of individuals and organizations in near real-time. Leveraging these data effectively and responsibly should therefore improve our ability to understand political, psychological, economic, and sociological behaviors and opinions across time...

Partisans appear to hold very different information about climate change, with Republicans more likely to respond to knowledge questions incorrectly than Democrats or Independents. As polarization undermines the ability of science to inform policy, clarifying why partisans report different science knowledge is vital. This study uses novel measureme...

Journalists rely on polls as they cover public opinion. In order to provide perspectives within the news stories, journalists frequently quote pundits – expert and partisan – who evaluate the methodological quality and implications of the numbers. While partisan pundits might attack unfavorable polls as biased and even fake, experts typically provi...

There is an ongoing debate in the survey research literature about whether and when probability and nonprobability sample surveys produce accurate estimates of a larger population. Statistical theory provides a justification for confidence in probability sampling as a function of the survey design, whereas inferences based on nonprobability samplin...

Survey researchers today can choose between relatively higher-cost probability sample telephone surveys and lower-cost surveys of nonprobability samples of potential respondents who complete questionnaires via the internet. Previous studies generally indicated that the former yield more accurate distributions of variables, but little work to date h...

This study leverages a survey experiment in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election to evaluate how partisan biases, poll results, and their methodological quality interact to shape people’s assessments of polling accuracy and electoral expectations. In a nationally representative sample, we find that individuals disproportionately find...

There is interest in using social media content to supplement or even substitute for survey data. In one of the first studies to test the feasibility of this idea, O’Connor, Balasubramanyan, Routledge, and Smith report reasonably high correlations between the sentiment of tweets containing the word “jobs” and survey-based measures of consumer confi...

Rationale: The Netflix show 13 Reasons Why (2017) aroused widespread concern regarding potential contagious effects of its graphic depiction of an adolescent girl's suicide and the events that led to her death. Objective: To explore the effects of the second season of the show in 2018. Method: We recruited a sample of young adults (ages 18-29;...

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Researchers hoping to make inferences about social phenomena using social media data need to answer two critical questions: What is it that a given social media metric tells us? And who does it tell us about? Drawing from prior work on these questions, we examine whether Twitter sentiment about Barack Obama tells us about Americans’ attitudes towar...

Scholars assessing the public understanding of science have long regarded informing Americans about scientific facts as key to raising Americans’ scientific literacy. But many Americans appear to be aware of the scientific consensus and nonetheless reject it. The individuals who are aware of the scientific consensus and reject its tenets tend to di...

Can Twitter data complement or supplement measures of economic confidence? This possibility was proposed in early work suggesting that sentiment surrounding the word "jobs" on Twitter closely tracked survey measures of consumer confidence. The current study uses knowledge of the processes generating Twitter data to develop and test hypotheses for w...

Background: Our objectives were to describe individuals' motivations for participation in an online social media community and to assess their level of trust in medical information provided by medical professionals and community members. Methods: A purposive survey was delivered to participants recruited through posts on the CGM in the Cloud gro...

Unsurprisingly, given the small extent to which the field of survey methodology has engaged the issue of linking datasets, there hasn’t been a ton of work done trying to assess exactly what we end up with when we merge together these big datasets and survey data and start looking at data quality. What I’m going to discuss in this chapter is an init...

While the ability to link survey data to government records can be extremely valuable to researchers, there are limits on the applicability of the government records to some types of research. However, there are additional sources of external records about survey respondents that may have some value if they were to be linked to the survey data and...

Individuals who provide incorrect answers to scientific knowledge questions have long been considered scientifically illiterate. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that motivated reasoning, rather than ignorance, may explain many of these incorrect answers. This article uses novel survey measures to assess two processes by which motivated reasoning...

Past work suggests that the priorities for information propagation in social media may be markedly different from the priorities for news selection in traditional media outlets. We explore this possibility here, focusing on the tone of both newspaper and Twitter content following changes in the U.S. unemployment rate, from 2008 to 2014. Results str...

Most Americans recognize that smoking causes serious diseases, yet many Americans continue to smoke. One possible explanation for this paradox is that perhaps Americans do not accurately perceive the extent to which smoking increases the probability of adverse health outcomes. This paper examines the accuracy of Americans’ perceptions of the absolu...

Exploring responses of 500. (PDF)

References for supporting information. (PDF)

Generalized Additive Models predicting the probability of being a current smoker vs. former smoker: FFRISP (n = 471). (PDF)

Generalized Additive Models predicting the probability of being a current smoker vs. never smoker: FFRISP (n = 714). (PDF)

Literature on the relation of health risk perceptions with quitting smoking. (PDF)

Generalized Additive Models predicting the probability of being a current smoker: SRBI Survey (n = 456). (PDF)

Survey methodology. (PDF)

Proportions of Americans who failed to assert that smoking is dangerous to human health: Gallup Organization Surveys. (PDF)

Generalized Additive Models predicting the probability of being a current smoker: Harris Interactive Survey (n = 795). (PDF)

Demographics of current and former smokers in the SRBI Survey, current and former smokers in the Harris Interactive Survey, all individuals in the FFRISP Survey, and the nation’s population. (PDF)

How do citizens' motivations shape their perceptions of poll reports? Increasingly, scholars are finding that citizens engage in motivated reasoning, whereby they discredit information that differs from their preexisting attitudes. The perceived credibility of opinion polls might be prone to similar motivational processes, as individuals could disc...

Background: The aim of this study is to compare demographic/disease characteristics of users versus nonusers of a do-it-yourself (DIY) mobile technology system for diabetes (Nightscout), to describe its uses and personalization, and to evaluate associated changes in health behaviors and outcomes. Methods: A cross-sectional, household-level onlin...

Although social media are increasingly used through mobile devices, the differences between mobile and computer-based practices remain unclear. This study attempts to tease out some of these differences through multiple analytical strategies and samples. Drawing on theoretical expectations about the affordances, motivations, and cognition of mobile...

Although scholars consider it important for citizens to seek diverse information to optimize citizenship, a growing body of research suggests that many people predominantly expose themselves to information that confirms their previous beliefs. Using four waves of survey data from an online panel of 2,450 Americans, this study explores a disconnect...

Social media measurement relies heavily on self-report survey research. Hence, known biases in how individuals answer survey questions can introduce systematic errors into the social media literature. In particular, many common social media measures are prone to acquiescence response bias, an error that occurs due to individuals' tendency to agree...

Demonstrations that analyses of social media content can align with measurement from sample surveys have raised the question of whether survey research can be supplemented or even replaced with less costly and burdensome data mining of already-existing or “found” social media content. But just how trustworthy such measurement can be—say, to replace...

Past research demonstrated that racial prejudice played a significant role in the 2008 presidential election, but relatively less is known about the relationship between prejudice and public opinion throughout the Obama administration. In the present research, we examined not only whether racial attitudes were associated with evaluations of Mr. Oba...

According to some recent research, Americans hold a great deal of misinformation about important political issues. However, such investigations treat incorrect answers to quiz questions measuring knowledge as evidence of misinformation. This study instead defines misperceptions as incorrect answers that respondents are confident are correct. Two su...

Communication theorists have long presumed that the capacity of mass media was essentially fixed. This study investigates the relevance of this assumption in the digital environment, where production and broadcasting capacities have become nearly infinite. Examining 2-years of data from Twitter and electronic databases of news articles revealed som...

Surveys have long been critical tools for understanding elections and forecasting their results. As the number of election surveys has increased in prevalence, researchers, journalists, and standalone political bloggers have sought to learn from the wealth of information released. This paper explores three central strategies for pooling surveys and...

In recent years, proponents of non-probability sample surveys and alternative data collection techniques have questioned the foundations of traditional survey research. Although evidence of large biases using traditional methods has not yet emerged, declining response rates and rising costs may soon usher in a new paradigm in the survey world. This...

A sizable portion of content published on websites and apps is personalized for individuals users. There are both costs and benefits to personalization. Critics point out the associated costs like reductions in personal privacy linked to corresponding data collection practices or the ways in which firms algorithmically curate content to serve their...

Survey research depends crucially on its ability to collect data from a targeted sample and for that sample to mirror the population of interest. Increasingly, survey firms are using data purchased from marketing firms such as Experian and Acxiom (consumer-file marketing data) as a means to improve correspondence between survey respondents and the...

Public opinion research is entering a new era, one in which traditional survey research may play a less dominant role. The proliferation of new technologies, such as mobile devices and social-media platforms, is changing the societal landscape across which public opinion researchers operate. As these technologies expand, so does access to users� th...

Despite the release of his birth certificate, some Americans express continued skepticism over whether Barack Obama was born in the United States. This study examined two possible causes of birther beliefs: that Republicans and conservatives, whose ideological beliefs and policy preferences led to disapproval of the president, might be particularly...

Much published research indicates that voting behavior in the 2008 presidential election and evaluations of Barack Obama were importantly influenced by anti-Black sentiment. Various psychological theories made opposing predictions as to whether exposure to the first Black president during his first term would strengthen or weaken the alignment betw...

Although some past studies suggest that candidates may receive more votes when their names are listed first among their competitors than when they are listed later, two recent studies challenged this conclusion with regard to major-party candidates running in statewide races and raised questions about the impact of analytic methods on the conclusio...

In some areas of science, beliefs and attitudes among citizens are becoming increasingly polarised, even politicised, despite all sides having access to the same information. Why? In this paper we examine the distinct roles of information and misinformation in explaining public mistrust of early-childhood vaccination programmes. We show how persona...

The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decades, more subtle implicit forms of prejudice (which come to mind automatically and may influence behavior unintentionally) m...

This article provides a summary of the literature's suggestions on survey design research. In doing so, it points researchers toward question formats that appear to yield the highest measurement reliability and validity. Using the American National Election Studies as a starting point, it shows the general principles of good questionnaire design, d...

Does Internet use have the potential to build social capital? Emerging evidence suggests that politically knowledgeable, interpersonally trusting, and civically engaged individuals share particular patterns of Internet use. In previous national survey studies, Internet use has been divided into a handful of excessively broad categories, and researc...

A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not...

In this study we evaluate different models of media use to determine whether televi-sion and other popular media facilitate or hinder the development of social capital in young people. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 14-to 22-year olds (N = 1800) to assess the media-social capital relationship controlling for pessimistic life outl...

The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both...

Despite a growing consensus that civic education is an important aspect of political socialization, little research has prospectively examined how gains made during civics courses are maintained after high school. This study used a quasi-experimental design to examine longer-term effects of the Student Voices program, which was originally evaluated...

School-based civic education is increasingly recognized as an effective means for increasing political awareness and participation in American youth. This study examines the Student Voices curriculum, implemented in 22 Philadelphia high schools, to assess program activities that mediate gains in outcomes linked to future political participation (fo...

This research examines the role of the mass media in young people's disengagement from politics. In a nationally representative telephone survey (N = 1,501), young people (ages 14 to 22) reported their habits for 12 different uses of mass media as well as awareness of current national politics and time spent in civic activities. Following Putnam's...