Refereed publications
Smith, Brianna A. “Pop culture resentment: testing existing and alternative measures of white racial attitudes” Politics, Groups, and Identities (2024). doi: 10.1080/21565503.2024.2346102
Available here
Understanding white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans is crucial in US public opinion. However, survey measurement of these attitudes is hampered by social desirability bias, low discriminant validity, and the potential for heightened demand characteristics and backlash. I propose a new measure: music genre preference. Using four online surveys comparing the performance of racial resentment, stereotype measures, and genre preference on social desirability, predictive and discriminant validity, and research awareness, I find that genre preference either outperforms or matches the established measures on these criteria. Genre preference thus provides a viable alternative for measuring white Americans’ attitudes toward Black Americans, and potentially other group attitudes in both the United States and other cultures.
Smith, Brianna A., Emily E. Ricotta, Jennifer L. Kwan, and Nicholas G. Evans. “COVID-19 risk perception and vaccine acceptance in individuals with self-reported chronic respiratory or autoimmune conditions.” Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology 19.1 (2023). doi: 10.1186/s13223-023-00791-6
Available here
Over the course of this pandemic, it has been recognized that individuals with respiratory and autoimmune diseases are disproportionately at risk of dying from COVID-19. How do these individuals perceive that risk – and how do they react to it? Here we report the results of two surveys of US residents, including an oversample of those who self-reported a chronic respiratory or autoimmune disease. We find that individuals with respiratory and autoimmune diseases are indeed more concerned about COVID-19 and more likely to adopt strategies such as social distancing. However, we also find that behaviors changed drastically over the course of the pandemic, and that those with autoimmune diseases show less willingness to be vaccinated than those with respiratory diseases.
Knapp, Emma R., Brianna A. Smith, and Matthew P. Motta. “Complementary or Competing Frames? The Impact of Economic and Public Health Messages on COVID-19 Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Political Science (2022): 1-13. doi: 10.1017/XPS.2022.6
Available here.
The American reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is polarized, with conservatives often less willing to engage in risk-mitigation strategies such as mask-wearing and vaccination. COVID-19 narratives are also polarized, as some conservative elites focus on the economy over public health. In this registered report, we test whether combining economic and public health messages can persuade individuals to increase support for COVID-19 risk mitigation. We present preliminary evidence that the combination of messages is complementary, rather than competing or polarizing. A preregistered larger-n follow-up study, however, failed to replicate this effect. While complementary frames may be a promising way to persuade voters on some issues, they may also struggle to overcome high levels of existing polarization.
Brianna A. Smith. “It’s All Under Control: Threat, Perceived Control, and Political Engagement.” Political Psychology (2021). doi: 10.1111/pops.12769
Available here.
In this article, I highlight two factors which explain when threat will increase political engagement: perceived control over the threat and individual differences in threat sensitivity. Using an experiment conducted during the 2016 US general election, I show that threats framed in high-control, preventable terms increase both political interest and reported turnout relative to low-control, inevitable framing—but only among those who are high in threat sensitivity.
Goren, Paul N., Matthew P. Motta, and Brianna A. Smith. “The Ideational Foundations of Symbolic Ideology.” Advances in Political Psychology (2020). doi:10.1111/pops.12683
Available here.
We explore whether politically sophisticated and unsophisticated individuals ground symbolic ideological identities in cognitive values. Using data from two nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that universalism and conservation predict liberal‐conservative attachments for people at all levels of sophistication. By contrast, openness to change and self‐enhancement values appear to have little influence on symbolic ideology.
Goren, Paul N., Brianna A. Smith, and Matthew P. Motta. “Human Values and Sophistication Interaction Theory.” Political Behavior (2020). doi: 10.1007/s11109-020-09611-8
Available here. Summarized in the Political Behavior blog.
We examine the degree to which education and political interest affect the structure and use of human values such as belief in universalism and tradition. We find that while people of all levels of political sophistication have well-formed concepts of their own value system, sophistication does have a (limited) effect on the use of human values in politics.
Smith, Brianna A., Scott Clifford, and Jennifer Jerit. “How Internet Search Undermines the Validity of Political Knowledge Measures.” Political Research Quarterly 73.1 (2020): 141-155. doi: 10.1177/1065912919882101
Available here.
Political knowledge is central to understanding citizens’ engagement with politics. Yet, as surveys are increasingly conducted online, participants’ ability to search the web may undermine the validity of factual knowledge measures. Using a series of experimental and observational studies, we provide consistent evidence that outside search degrades the validity of political knowledge measures. Our findings imply that researchers conducting online surveys need to take steps to discourage and diagnose search engine use.
Ekstrom, Pierce, Brianna A. Smith, Allison Williams, and Hannah Kim. “Social Network Disagreement and Reasoned Candidate Preferences” American Politics Research 48.1 (2020): 132-154. doi: 1532673X19858343
Available here. Summarized in the LSE USAPP blog.
Using panel data from the 2008 and 2012 U.S. Presidential elections, we find that respondents in high-disagreement networks tend to shift their attitudes and behavior to align with their policy preferences regardless of their party identification. In low-disagreement networks, respondents tended to follow party over policy. In sum, the determinants of political differ depending on individuals’ social networks.
Smith, Brianna A., Zein Murib, Matthew P. Motta, Timothy H. Callaghan, and Marissa Theys. ‘“Gay” or “Homosexual”? The Implications of Social Category Labels for the Structure of Mass Attitudes.’ American Politics Research 46.2 (2018): 336-372. doi: 10.1177/1532673X17706560
Available here. Summarized in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, and the LSE USAPP blog.
While “homosexual” and “gay and lesbian” are often regarded as synonyms, we show that wording choice is crucial to attitudes about gay and lesbian rights. We begin by providing a historical overview of these terms, and then use a survey experiment to show that attitudes about “homosexual” policies are more negative among authoritarians who view so-called “homosexuals” as an out-group – while the effect of authoritarianism and out-group context on “gay or lesbian” policies is much reduced.
Motta, Matthew P., Timothy H. Callaghan, and Brianna A. Smith. “Looking for Answers: Identifying Search Behavior and Improving Knowledge-Based Data Quality in Online Surveys.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 29.4 (2017): 575-603. doi: 10.1093/ijpor/edw027
Available here.
Internet surveys are more convenient for respondents, but also leave them unmonitored by researchers. We find that “cheating” on political knowledge surveys is pervasive using a novel method for detecting when people look up answers to difficult knowledge questions. Cheating on these difficult questions predicts inflated performance on easier questions. Fortunately, we also show that simple changes in question instructions significantly reduce instances of cheating and increase data quality.
Chen, Philip G., Jacob Appleby, Eugene Borgida, Timothy H. Callaghan, Pierce Ekstrom, Christina E. Farhart, Elizabeth Housholder, Hannah Kim, Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, Howard Lavine, Matthew D. Luttig, Ruchika Mohanty, Aaron Rosenthal, Geoff Sheagley, Brianna A. Smith, Joseph A. Vitriol and Allison Williams. “The Minnesota Multi‐Investigator 2012 Presidential Election Panel Study.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 14.1 (2014): 78-104. doi: 10.1111/asap.12041
The researchers conducted a multi-wave, multi-investigator online panel survey during the 2012 US presidential election. We discuss the results of three survey-experiments, as well as the methodological challenges and successes of conducting panel research using online survey platforms.
Working papers
Ivermectin Search Interest Over the Pandemic Period: Risk Factors and Considerations
Bents, Samantha, Brendan Lawler, Brianna A. Smith, Emily Ricotta, and Maimuna Majumder.
System or Status Threat? Understanding Group and Society Based Threat
Smith, Brianna A. and Diogo Ferrari
A Different Demographic: Americans’ Conservative Shift in Response to the Rise in LGBTQ+ Self-Identification
Smith, Brianna A
The Psychological Determinants of Public Support for Narcissistic Leaders
Beauregard, Philippe and Brianna A. Smith
Threat Sensitivity, Policy Concern, and Partisan Preference
Kim, Hannah and Brianna A. Smith
Popular Culture Resentment: Media Preference as a Proxy for White Racial Attitudes.
Smith, Brianna A.
Primed for Violence: The Weapons Effect and Racialized Aggression
Smith, Brianna A.
Brianna A. Smith 