Brianna Smith, Ph.D.
smithb@usna.edu
Assistant Professor
United States Naval Academy
About Me:
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the US Naval Academy, where I teach American Government and Political Psychology. My broad research agenda involves incorporating theories of psychology and decision making to better understand the complex ways that people form political opinions and become involved in participatory democracy. My dissertation focused on how different rhetorical frames and different personalities interact to shape how people respond to political threats. Currently, my major projects focus on how to measure racial attitudes using popular culture opinions, and how COVID-19 rhetoric affects health behavior.
Research Interests
Political Psychology
Political Participation
Networks And Politics
Public Opinion
Research Methods & Research Design
Experimental Research
Political Threat
Covid-19
Countries of Interest
United States
My Research:
My dissertation focused on how different rhetorical frames and different personalities interact to shape how people respond to political threats. Specifically, the framing of threat as controllable (preventable) rather than uncontrollable (inevitable) causes some people to increase their political participation, but also increases partisan polarization among the public as a whole. As mainstream politicians rely more and more on threat to gain support, it is important to understand what effect their rhetoric has on the public. I am currently applying this research to better understanding reactions to COVID-19. I also conduct research on survey methodology, including how wording affects the attitudes expressed about same-sex attraction, how cheating affects the measurement of political knowledge, and how we can best measure racial attitudes.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.