This talk will explore the relationship between trust in science, digital platforms, social ties, and maintaining false beliefs in times of high uncertainty. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel data, we will discuss how social groups evolve accurate knowledge over time and reduce their misperceptions.

Trust in scientific and social institutions has a strong association with the accuracy of our views about the world. Misperceptions and conspiratorial thinking are often linked to lower trust in experts and people in a position of power. While we have increasingly come to examine trust in science in light of partisanship, the two have independent effects on individual information-related behaviors.

The digital platforms we use and our social environment play an important role in our exposure to new information. At the same time, they have complicated relationships with our trust in social institutions. Unpacking these associations, we will demonstrate that they operate at different stages of the process through which individuals come to accept false narratives about current events.

Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova is an associate professor at the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her research examines the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation.

Ognyanova’s methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. She is the director of the Rutgers Computational Social Science Lab. Her recent work examines the links between misinformation exposure and political trust.  

Ognyanova is one of the founders and a principal investigator for the COVID States Project and the Civic Health and Institutions Project, two large multi-university initiatives exploring public attitudes to politics and health.

Ognyanova’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Her work has been covered in news outlets including The New York Times, NPR, Politico, Washington Post, and WIRED, among others.