Kate KenskiThe University of Arizona | UA · Department of Communication
Kate Kenski
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
About
108
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3,176
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Publications
Publications (108)
Operatives working for the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) infiltrated social media with the goal of disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We investigate how these operatives or “trolls” leveraged partisan political identities in discussing presidential candidates and parties on Twitter. Adopting a social identity lens, we conceptu...
This study investigates the relationship between presidential candidate evaluations and following the candidates on five social media (SM) platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Analyses of national survey data collected during the 2020 presidential campaign (N = 2,120) suggest that following a candidate on SM is positively...
Two previous studies investigated the relationship between newspaper issue agendas and those of candidate and campaign Twitter feeds during the presidential nomination seasons in 2012 and 2016. Both found the intermedia agenda-setting power resided with newspapers. This study replicates the previous two by examining the issue agendas of the nation’...
The gender political knowledge gap has proven to be persistent and pervasive. It extends across time, geography, and cultures. When it comes to national politics, women demonstrate lower political knowledge than men, and this has a detrimental effect on a deliberative democracy. The current study employed an elaborative and political socialization...
Although experts agree that the Russian Internet Research Agency deployed trolls on Twitter to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election, questions remain about the nuances of their efforts. We examined almost 350,000 original tweets made during the two-year electoral cycle to investigate the emphasis, timing, content, and partisanship of the tro...
Presidential debates are a source of political learning for those who watch them. This study examines how learning from debates cultivates intentions for political engagement by increasing individuals’ opinion articulation. Using data from a study that involved participants (N = 543) who watched a nine-minute video from the first 2020 general elect...
Although selective avoidance, commonly practiced as unfriending and muting on social media, has been assumed to be at odds with the democratic ideal of deliberation, academic literature says little about its antecedents and consequences. Drawing from the framework of psychological needs for information processing, we examine whether need for cognit...
One mechanism by which citizens learn about candidates and issues is through watching presidential debates. Some scholars have raised concerns that these events, however, disproportionately benefit those already high in political knowledge more so than others with lesser knowledge levels. We hypothesize that knowledge begets knowledge because it pr...
Online discussions are performed in the gaze of fellow users. To increase engagement, platforms typically let these users evaluate the comments made by others through rating systems (e.g., via Likes or Down/Up votes). Understanding how such ratings shape, and are shaped by, features of the underlying discussion is important for our understanding of...
This study investigates factors predicting political information sharing on social media in the election context. Specifically, the current study examines how users’ six motivations for political information sharing and exposure to political disagreement on social media predict their political information sharing behaviors. Analyses of national sur...
Structured analytic techniques (SATs) have been developed to help the intelligence community reduce flaws in cognition that lead to faulty reasoning. To ascertain whether SATs provide benefits to reasoning we conducted an experiment within a web-based application, comparing three conditions: 1) unaided reasoning, 2) a prototypical order-based SAT a...
Despite a fast-growing body of literature on fake news and mis-/disinformation, there remains surprisingly little empirical work on the social/political consequences of exposure to false information. Addressing this issue, this study provides initial evidence that perceptions of false information exposure catalyze political cynicism. The findings f...
In an example, a computer-implemented method to structure an analytical workflow that improves reasoning based on a problem context and demonstrated abilities of each individual user may include displaying a reasoning problem to an analyst. The method may include receiving input from the analyst to identify a reasoning problem type of the reasoning...
News coverage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and President Obama’s announced Clean Power Plan (CPP) served as data for two case studies. Social network analysis was used to investigate the sources used by cable giants CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Both case studies show the extent of sourcing varies across the three news outl...
Improving reasoning in intelligence analysis is of vital national importance. The Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for Crowdsourcing and Evaluation (TRACE) Project takes a user-centered design approach combined with rigorous experimentation to ascertain effective structured techniques to support high-quality reasoning. Results suggest light structu...
That games can be used to teach specific content has been demonstrated numerous times. However, although specific game features have been conjectured to have an impact on learning outcomes, little empirical research exists on the impact of iterative design on learning outcomes. This article analyzes two games that have been developed to train an ad...
Political campaigns have been systematically using social media for strategic advantage. However, little is known about how competitiveness affects the ways candidates communicate online. Our study analyzes how race competitiveness as measured by polling performance influences candidates’ strategies on Twitter and Facebook. We analyze all social me...
The engaging nature of video games has intrigued learning professionals attempting to capture and retain learners’ attention. Designing learning interventions that not only capture the learner’s attention, but also are designed around the natural cycle of attention will be vital for learning. This paper introduces the temporal attentive observation...
Incivility is a growing concern among Americans and a burgeoning topic of scholarly research. The current study investigates the extent to which incivility via lying accusations was present in major party candidate and campaign expressions on Twitter during the invisible primary season preceding the 2016 presidential election. All tweets on verifie...
This study examines the potential that shared political documentary viewing coupled with public deliberation via focus group discussion has for political sensemaking and civic engagement. Specifically, we examine college students’ perceptions of sensemaking, future civic engagement, and benefits of participating in group discussion following the sh...
The rolling cross-section (RCS) design is a type of repeated cross-sectional design that allows for the capturing of dynamic changes in public opinion. This entry compares the RCS design to single cross-section and panel designs. The basic features of the RCS design are described. Then, the benefits and limitations of the RCS design are offered.
Two recent changes in the political arena should prompt a rethinking of our theories and definitions of political communication: the emergence of trans-national and non-national actors on the international political stage and the enhanced ability of individuals to convey messages to large scale audiences. For example, the entity called IS, ISIL or...
After exploring the challenges involved in defining incivility, this chapter addresses the evolution of the concept, notes the dispute over trend lines, and précises work on its psychological effects. It then outlines some functions that civility and incivility serve, such as the functions of differentiating and mobilizing, marginalizing the powerl...
This chapter offers three sets of definitions of “political communication”: those from early scholarly works, those from the major communication and political science associations, and a set of definitions that emerged at an Annenberg Public Policy Center conference attended by many scholars contributing to this handbook. The authors discuss the in...
Although incivility is an increasing concern among scholars and the public, explanations for this phenomenon sometimes overlook the role of computer-mediated communication. Drawing from the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE), we consider incivility as a form of identity performance occurring in the visually anonymous contexts t...
This study examined the relationship between elite news media agendas and campaign agendas during the 2016 presidential primary season. Computer-assisted content analysis was used to assess issue emphasis within Twitter feeds of U.S. presidential primary candidates and their campaigns as well as the nation’s top newspapers. The relationship between...
This chapter focuses on two biases that lead people away from evaluating evidence and scientific studies impartially—confirmation bias and bias blind spot. The chapter first discusses different ways in which people process information and reviews the costs and benefits of utilizing cognitive shortcuts in decision making. Next, two common cognitive...
This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N = 94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the can...
The study of political campaign communication focuses on the elements of the political environment, messengers, messages, channels of communication (print, radio, television, social media, etc.), audience, and effects. This chapter explains the presidential vote in 2016, and it draws upon the key factors in political campaign communication to expla...
Incivility in public discourse has become a pressing concern of citizens and scholars alike, but most research has focused narrowly on incivility in elite discourse. The present study examines how the lay public perceives incivility, using two surveys to track differences in perceptions of specific types of uncivil speech and identify predictors of...
Educational games have generated attention for their potential to teach more successfully and with longer-lasting outcomes than those generated by traditional teaching methods. Questions remain, however, about what features of games enhance learning. This study investigates the effects of art style and narrative complexity on training outcomes of a...
After exploring the challenges involved in defining incivility, this chapter addresses the evolution of the concept, notes the dispute over trend lines, and précises work on its psychological effects. It then outlines some functions that civility and incivility serve, such as the functions of differentiating and mobilizing, marginalizing the powerl...
This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ens...
As research on serious games continues to grow, we investigate the efficacy of digital games to train enhanced decision making through understanding cognitive biases. This study investigates the ability of a 30-minute digital game as compared with a 30-minute video to teach people how to recognize and mitigate three cognitive biases: fundamental at...
Political campaigns in the United States routinely use social networking sites as part of their strategic communication. Although digital campaigns have been a topic of scholarly interest for nearly two decades (Bimber and Davis 2003; Foot and Schneider 2006; Stromer-Galley 2014), few studies examine the relationship between public opinion polls an...
Although human use of heuristics can result in 'fast and frugal' decision-making, those prepotent tendencies can also impair our ability to make optimal choices. Previous work had suggested such cognitive biases are resistant to mitigation training. Serious games offer a method to incorporate desirable elements into a training experience, and allow...
The number of educational or serious games (SGs) available to educators has increased in recent years as the cost of game development has been reduced. A benefit of SGs is that they employ not only lesson content but also knowledge contexts where learners can connect information to its context of use with active participation and engagement. This,...
Questions exist over the extent to which social media content may bypass, follow, or attract the attention of traditional media. This study sheds light on such dynamics by examining intermedia agenda-setting effects among the Twitter feeds of the 2012 presidential primary candidates, Twitter feeds of the Republican and Democratic parties, and artic...
Drawing from recent research on the ability of video games to satisfy psychological needs, this paper identifies how the presence of rewards influences learning complex concepts and tasks using an educational video game. We designed and developed two 60-minute educational games with and without a range of reward features and examined learning outco...
Cognitive biases are systematic errors that result from reliance on heuristics in decision-making. Such biases are typically automatic and unconscious influences on behavior, and can occur in a wide range of situations and contexts. Cognitive biases are generally resistant to mitigation training. This project adopted a novel approach to develop com...
Background Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement vary widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence, flow, arousal, participation, and other concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. Howeve...
Incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from academic and popular commentators in recent years. In an effort to better understand the nature and determinants of such incivility, this study examined a 3‐week census of articles and comments posted to a local newspaper's website—totaling more than 300 articles and 6,400 comm...
Background. Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement vary widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence, flow, arousal, participation, and other concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. Howev...
This study examines Twitter use by presidential candidates during the 2012 primary election. The Twitter feeds and activity levels of candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, and Americans Elect parties and their campaigns were gathered over a 3-month span. Variables examined include the number of tweets posted, followers gained, an...
In this study, the authors examine the composition of the audiences for the presidential and vice presidential debates in 2008. Results from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey show that the size of the vice presidential debate-viewing audience in 2008 exceeded the sizes of the presidential debate-viewing audiences, which is atypical from p...
Previous studies suggest that vice presidential candidates have little impact on the presidential vote. Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), the author examines the extent to which the vice presidential selections from the two major parties had an impact on the presidential vote in 2008. The results show that vice pre...
Using data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), this study finds that during the general election, adults in the United States were more likely to report that John McCain, who was 71 during the 2008 primaries and 72 in the general election, was “too old to be president” than to report that Barack Obama was “too young to be presi...
Past research suggests that there is a relationship between survey response and topic salience, namely that individuals responding
to a survey are likely to find the survey topic more salient than nonrespondents do. For election surveys, nonresponse resulting
from a lack of salience can influence findings because respondents may be more interested...
Scholars and the media have long been concerned about gender gaps in the political sphere. This study examines gender differences in decision certainty across the 2000 general election campaign. Results suggest that during the 2000 general election campaign, women were more likely to say that they did not know for whom they intended to vote when as...
We question the validity of traditional polling about the likelihood of respondents to vote for a woman president and argue that the use of such polls may overestimate sexism and underestimate the role that party identification and individual characteristics play in deciding about whether to vote for a woman president. Our analysis of data collecte...
Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 Presidential election, this study explores whether expectancy value (EV) models predicting attitudes toward candidates and toward voting for candidates can be improved by incorporating measures of issue importance. More specifically, attitudes toward candidates were predicted from beliefs about the ca...
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...
In 2004, the vote margin between the major party presidential candidates was slim but wider than in 2000, leading scholars, pundits, and politicians to ask: among which demographic groups did George W. Bush specifically and the Republican party more generally make gains? Using data from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES),...
Using data from the 2000 National/Annenberg Election Survey, this study looks at the relationships between Internet access and online exposure to information about the presidential campaign and political efficacy, knowledge, and participation. Results show that Internet access and online exposure to information about the presidential campaign are s...
Using post-election data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study finds that compared to the 2000 election, candidate issue knowledge was relatively high by the end of the 2004 general election. It argues that just as in 2000, voters’ mistakes in matching presidential candidates with their issue positions benefited Republican in...
Objective. This article examines how issue saliency affects the public's perceptions of whether a man or a woman would make a better president when considering the most important problem facing the nation. Method. The study uses telephone survey data of adults in the United States collected by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in September 2003. M...
Gender gaps in political knowledge have been found persistently in the social science literature. The central argument of this dissertation is that the gender gap in political knowledge is the product of a complex set of political, social, and psychological factors. Gender, although seemingly easy to measure as male or female, represents more than...
Presidential debates are a main feature of present-day presidential campaigns. For voters, they are a source of political learning about candidate issue positions. Fluctuations in the level of debate viewership from election to election and, within an election, from debate to debate invite the following questions: What is the composition of debate...
Long before the political conventions of 2004, the Kerry and Bush campaigns and their surrogates were laying the groundwork for the fall campaign with heavy ad buys. Some of the assertions made on each side were misleading. Here we explore three misleading claims made on each side in the weeks following the effective end of the 2004 primary season...
The prospect of Internet voting has received much attention because of concerns over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Proponents of Internet voting contend that the Internet will play an important role in revitalizing the American electorate. Opponents counter that Internet voting will benefit already advantaged groups. Using data collec...
Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study examines the predictors of reporting that a woman or man would do a better job as president considering the national issue most important to the respondent. Gender, education, and ideology are strong predictors of presidential gender preference. Naming health care as the most i...
Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, this study examines the predictors of reporting that a woman or man would do a better job as president considering the national issue most important to the respondent. Gender, education, and ideology are strong predictors of presidential gender preference. Naming health care as the most i...
After examining the rhetoric of the network broadcast coverage on election night 2000, it is concluded that although individual “decision desk” call times were not identical across networks, there was a consistent pattern of correct and incorrect calls. The language of the election night broadcasts undercut network credibility on two counts. First,...
This paper examines the extent to which an integrated theoretical behavioural prediction model can explain the intentions of 215 male and 181 female multi-partnered heterosexuals (MPHs) to always use condoms for vaginal sex with their regular partners. For female MPHs, all five of the immediate psychosocial determinants of intention (i.e. attitude,...
The factors influencing 90 male and 42 female injecting drug users' (N = 132) intentions to always use a condom while having vaginal sex with a regular partner were analyzed. For male IDUs, the partner norm (beta = 0.40), the mean of the weighted control beliefs (beta = 0.26), attitude (beta = 0.22) and perceived behavioural control (beta = 0.15) w...
Prior research on political knowledge has found repeatedly that women do not perform as well as men on political affairs questions. The present study analyzed survey responses collected between 14 December 1999 and 8 March 2000 on political knowledge items about the issue positions and backgrounds of candidates Bradley, Gore, and McCain. Even when...
Projects
Projects (4)
https://traceproject.syr.edu
The TRACE (Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for Collaboration and Evaluation) Project aims at improve reasoning and intelligence analysis through the development of a web-based application that will leverage the use of structured techniques, crowdsourcing and smart nudging to enhance analysts' problem-solving abilities and foster creative thinking.
CYCLES are two standalone computer video games that successfully train the mitigation of cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are systematic errors that result from reliance on heuristics in decision-making.
One game tackles fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and bias blind spot. A second game tackles anchoring, projection, and representativeness.