What is your professional background and primary research area? 

My academic background is in political science. My research field is political psychology, where my core interest is to contribute to our understanding of how people's psychological dispositions shape the formation of political attitudes and reactions to political communication. I think it is crucial to deepen our understand and address democratic core challenges such as political polarization, attitude gaps, and lack of trust. In my research, I work interdisciplinary, combining insights and methods from political science, psychology, communication, and biology. I have always been fascinated by understanding why deep attitude differences arise between people, what drives them in modern democracies, and why it can sometimes be very challenging to bridge those gaps. In a scientific context, I became acquainted with the research field towards the end of my master's degree, where I also gained insight into how to research the effects of political communication on citizen’s attitudes through experimental methods. It was extremely exciting and sparked my desire and curiosity to delve into the area through a PhD scholarship. This fundamental curiosity still drives me in my research today. 

On a daily basis, I lead the Exemplar Democracy research group where we explore how personal narratives in political communication affect citizens' factual perceptions of societal issues and how they attribute responsibility to politicians for solving them. 

Read more about the research project Exemplar Democracy - Psychological Biases and the Impact of Exemplars on Factual Perceptions and Attributions of Government Responsibility, funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, in this interview (in Danish) 

What are your ongoing research projects in SHAPE about? 

In SHAPE, I work as part of my project 'Social Media and Democratic Citizenship' collaboratively with partners from Centre for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University. We are working on a project where we investigate how personal narratives in political communication from news media and politicians on social media influence users' likes, shares, and comments on the communication and their perception of the topics. We analyze political communication from politicians and news media on X and Facebook in the USA and England. We manually code a sample of data, which we use to train and validate algorithms to categorize large amounts of data. The goal is for the project to contribute to our understanding of the use of personal narratives in politicians and news media communication on social media, and whether the narratives have an "extreme" character, contributing to maintaining and increasing perceptions of political polarization in the population. 

This project has led to another more methodologically oriented project - also in collaboration with, among others, Centre for Humanities Computing - where we investigate how accurate language models like ChatGPT and open-source alternatives are in automatically categorizing communication content (specifically on X) focusing on typical social science concepts. In the project, we discuss our results also considering Open Science principles. It is essential to contribute to uncovering how artificial intelligence (AI) and language models can provide new opportunities for social science research in a way that avoids pitfalls and maintains core research values such as transparency, replicability, and open access. 

What future projects do you have in the pipeline? 

Of relevance to the problem field and related to SHAPE, we are developing a new project that will look at how personal narratives in new formats of news communication on social media such as TikTok and podcasts affect citizens' understanding of societal issues and the development of empathy towards outgroups. Democratic conversation is shifting to social media and mobile phones in these years, prompting journalism to experiment with new formats. We want to contribute to understanding what these new formats mean for citizens’ political knowledge and learning, which is of crucial democratic importance.