Associate Professor Hillary Shulman and PhD student Blue Lerner were published in Communication Research Reports for their paper “Science terms elicit ideological differences in message processing."

Their experiment looks at evidence that liberals and conservatives understand scientific information in different ways. Liberals usually react negatively to complex scientific language, which is common. Conservatives, however, react more positively to scientific jargon.

“This latter association is weird, and might offer indirect evidence that conservatives tend to be more skeptical of science information,” said Shulman.