Ben Lyons

Honored to be among this cohort. The fellowship will support my research on how the partisan loyalty of older adults and institutional distrust among younger adults create different paths to polarization, with the goal of developing age-specific solutions. #CarnegieFellows

@dee_of_e saw Boogie Nights in packed theater of younger people apparently seeing it for their first time based on reactions, huge cheers when Rollergirl stomps the guy and when the Colonel gets smacked in prison

as an adjacent logic to this, my students have started saying Get Out is “bad” (aesthetically) because “bad things” (morally??? idk) happen in it. I’m instinctively Blaming fandom for this

@LingoUnbound kinda good

that cover...

Link to paper: osf.io/preprints/psya…

Economics is about the same as political science in the "reproducibility" paper, which looked at whether data and code was available and could reproduce results in a sample of articles. Again, read the paper for details: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Economics doesn't look better in the "robustness" paper. Honestly, econ looks worse than PS and psych but the difference is tiny and not worth obsessing over. Experimental work looks better than observational. Read the paper for details: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Not all news clicks teach us something. In POQ, Cardenal et al., using digital trace data, find that only article-level exposure to Ukraine stories—not general news browsing—predicted who learned about the Russian invasion. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/nf…

Nearly half of Americans (46%) report using AI to get news at least occasionally--but most are light users. Only ~14% use it 3+ times a week. Some people use AI as their primary interface to society, even if the models are not really up to the task.

What happens when a polarized democracy bans a social media platform? New working paper with Christopher Barrie, @mollyeroberts, Chris Schwarz, and @j_a_tucker. We study Brazil's 2024 ban on X and find it created what we define as a "partisan sorting ratchet ." 🧵 ⬇️ 1/

Conditionally accepted at the APSR (w/ @scottclifford & @patrickpliu): Why does political information so often change beliefs but NOT attitudes? We highlight the role of belief relevance, or the extent to which beliefs bear on attitudes.

The results differ substantially across platforms. @Prolific and @CloudResearch’s Connect panel have relatively low failure rates, while Mturk (even via @CloudResearch) has a high failure rate.

The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election dlvr.it/TRFjvC

We just executed 2.8 million search queries in 243 countries in 2024 and 2025, generating both AI and traditional search results to understand the implications of the Rise of AI Search....

@BenjaminCrew1 I found an important video re: mad men that I need to share m.youtube.com/shorts/FQ39h79…

New Pub Alert from @UtahCGM! Exposure to low-credibility online health content is limited and is concentrated among older adults pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41639217/?utm_…

@1000TimesYes it is a famous Eggleston photo though, who spoon and big star have used on covers previously

Imagine being in a band and not thinking twice about putting a Coca-Cola logo on your album cover

Research finds that people overestimate how many social media users post harmful content--which makes us think the world is worse than it really is. On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). Overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/arti…

Our paper "Exposure to low-credibility online health content is limited and is concentrated among older adults", out now in @NatureAging

shoutout to Jacksonville, Illinois

New preprint revisiting a 2025 Nature Human Behaviour study on perceived scientist trustworthiness across 68 countries/regions. see osf.io/preprints/psya… The original study ranked countries and explained trust differences using observed-score averages.