PhD student Shannon Poulsen was the lead author on a paper published in PLOS One, Comparing beliefs in falsehoods based on satiric and non-satiric news, with School of Communication Director Professor Kelly Garrett and Associate Professor Robert Bond. 

Poulsen, Kelly and Bond’s article seeks to quantify the extent to which Americans hold beliefs that are consistent with interpreting satiric news. The paper assesses whether factors known to promote misconceptions work differently depending on whether the source of the misconception is satire. The research looks at the robustness of those factors across a diverse set of real-world falsehoods. The study confirms the robustness of established predictors of misperceptions while demonstrating that the associations differ in magnitude between satiric and non-satiric news.