Molly Offer-Westort is assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Chicago. Her work combines experimental design with machine learning methods to answer causal questions. Her ongoing substantive research agenda examines online behavior to understand how people change their views and attitudes in response to the conversations they take part in and the information they engage with online. Her 2024 Nature Human Behaviour article, “Battling the Coronavirus ‘Infodemic’ among Social Media Users in Kenya and Nigeria,” used a contextual adaptive experiment to identify the most effective interventions for curbing the spread of misinformation online.
In other work, she has conducted social media experiments to optimally target informational messaging to people hesitant to adopt vaccines and to measure the efficacy of online deep canvassing. Her work in statistical methodology develops and advances tools for experimental design and analysis. Offer-Westort holds a PhD from Yale, joint in political science and statistics and data science, along with a graduate degree in public policy from Princeton University.
Her project, “Digital Dialogues: Understanding Political Polarization through Online Discourse,” will emphasize the human aspect of online study design and will propose enhanced infrastructure for researchers who study social media platforms. Using the developed infrastructure for social media studies, the project will propose a series of studies that directly recruit social media users into extended online conversations, building out connections between online discourse and social media users’ downstream decisions.
May 2024
