Friday, October 25, 2024
2:00pm - 4:00pm EST
Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St
Commentator:
Donghyun Danny Choi, Brown University
Sumitra Badrinathan is an assistant professor of political science in the Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics at American University's School of International Service. In 2021-22, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2021.
Her research focuses on political communication in South Asia, with an emphasis on new platforms like WhatsApp and their effects on political misinformation, media trust, and the quality of democracy. She uses experimental and survey methods to investigate potential solutions to misinformation in developing countries, along with the consequences of misinformation on political and societal outcomes, including violence, vote choice, polarization, and social cohesion.
Her work has appeared in academic journals such as the American Political Science Review (x2) and PS: Political Science and Politics, as well as popular press outlets like The Washington Post.
Sumitra holds an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Psychology from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.
"As evidenced during covid-19, medical misinformation can have severe consequences, especially among populations with low levels of digital literacy and education. This paper evaluates whether a sustained, classroom-based media literacy education intervention can help school children in Bihar, India, become more discerning consumers of public health information. Collaborating with Bihar's state government, we developed and fielded an RCT across 583 villages, targeting over 12,000 students, that aimed to engage them in classroom discussions about health misinformation topics. Results from intent-to-treat estimates demonstrate that our intervention had significant impacts on a number of counts: treated students showed heightened ability to discern between true and false information, changed health preferences, increased reliance on scientific medicine and lower dependence on untrustworthy sources of news. We resurveyed participants 6 months after the program ended and found that not only did effects persist, treated respondents were able to discern true from false political information as well. Finally, we also detect spillover network effects within families: parents of treated students are significantly better at discerning true from false information. These findings hold significant implications for assessing the efficacy of media literacy measures at scale in light of previous studies that often yield null or mixed results. Our paper speaks to the ability of policy-based interventions to have externally valid and long-term results"