Andrew M. Guess

About

Andrew M. Guess is an associate professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. His research employs quantitative and computational methods to investigate the relationship between digital media and politics. His work addresses key questions such as the extent to which digital and social media facilitate encounters with differing political perspectives, the prevalence and effects of online misinformation, and the relationship between social media and political outcomes including polarization and trust. Additionally, he explores how social platforms can improve knowledge and promote news diet quality, as well as how researchers can use survey and digital trace data to measure concepts related to digital media and politics. He is also a founding co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, alongside Kevin Munger and Eszter Hargittai, contributing to the development of the journal's philosophy and goals.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Internet privacy
• Law
• Psychology
• Advertising
• Social psychology
• Business
• Media studies

Selected publications

• A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment between mainstream and false news in the United States and India

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 715 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Widespread belief in misinformation circulating online is a critical challenge for modern societies. While research to date has focused on psychological and political antecedents to this phenomenon, few studies have explored the role of digital media literacy shortfalls. Using data from preregistered survey experiments conducted around recent elections in the United States and India, we assess the effectiveness of an intervention modeled closely on the world's largest media literacy campaign, wh…

  DOI

• Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 · 560 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing

  Nature · 2023 · 296 citations

  . Here we present data from 2020 for the entire population of active adult Facebook users in the USA showing that content from 'like-minded' sources constitutes the majority of what people see on the platform, although political information and news represent only a small fraction of these exposures. To evaluate a potential response to concerns about the effects of echo chambers, we conducted a multi-wave field experiment on Facebook among 23,377 users for whom we reduced exposure to content fro…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook

  Science · 2023 · 291 citations

  Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that users could have seen in their feeds with the information that they saw (after algorithmic curation) and the information with which they engaged. We show that (i) ideological segregation is high and increases as we shift from potential exposure to actual ex…

  PublisherDOI

• How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?

  Science · 2023 · 286 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  We investigated the effects of Facebook's and Instagram's feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of c…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brendan Nyhan

  136 shared

• Jason Reifler

  University of Exeter

  75 shared

• Benjamin Lyons

  University of Utah

  67 shared

• Jacob Montgomery

  Washington University in St. Louis

  65 shared

• Michael Lerner

  56 shared

• Neelanjan Sircar

  Centre for Policy Research

  56 shared

• Pablo Barberá

  New York University

  44 shared

• Simon Munzert

  Hertie School

  35 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Columbia University

  2015

Similar researchers at Princeton University

• G. John Ikenberryh-123
• Carles Boixh-32
• Amaney A. Jamalh-29