Ben Lyons

Ben Lyons is an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah. His work employs surveys, experiments, web tracking, and spatial data to understand how individuals interact with information environments. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Aging, Journal of Communication, and Vaccine, and has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, AARP, and Der Spiegel. 

He previously served as a research fellow at the University of Exeter and the Martin Fishbein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an associate of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra and currently serves as associate editor for the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. Lyons’s forthcoming book, Misinformation and the Aging American (Oxford University Press, 2026), examines the partisan roots of older adults’ engagement with misinformation online. 

Lyons’s Project, “How Generations Polarize: Understanding Age-Structured Polarization and the Future of Democratic Resilience,” reframes polarization as generationally distinct: older adults display greater partisan polarization, but younger adults are more likely to demonstrate anti-system attitudes and weaker democratic commitment. Using a variety of data, “How Generations Polarize” explains why polarization’s effects differ across ages and designs tailored interventions to strengthen democratic resilience and reduce polarization among both younger and older Americans.

May 2026