Emoji Use | Reporting intimate image abuse: UMSI Research Roundup

University of Michigan School of Information faculty and PhD students are creating and sharing knowledge that helps build a better world. Here are some of their recent publications. 

Publications 

Attribution of responsibility for corrupt decisions

European Journal of Political Economy, June 2026

Maria Montero, Alex Possajennikov, Yuliet Verbel

This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, participants labeled as either citizens or public officials can propose a bribery transaction to another participant (labeled as either public official or citizen, respectively), who decides whether to accept the proposal. We then let either the victims of the corrupt transaction or the bystanders of it judge the individual decisions of proposing and accepting. We interpret these judgments as a measure of responsibility attribution. We find that labels (citizen or public official) have a stronger effect than positions in the decision sequence (proposer or responder): public officials are consistently regarded as more responsible for corruption than citizens, while those accepting a bribery transaction are regarded as only somewhat more responsible than those proposing it. Further, we find that victims judge corruption decisions more severely than bystanders, although bystanders’ judgments are also consistently negative. In treatments with a neutral context, we find that judgments are less harsh than in the corruption context, bystanders’ judgments are much less harsh than those of victims, and responders are judged more severely than proposers. Our results suggest that people judge corrupt actors in context, more harshly when they are labeled as law enforcers (i.e., public officials), and that unaffected parties (i.e., bystanders) react nearly as negatively to corruption as those directly affected by it (i.e., victims).

Knowledge contribution on enterprise social media and employee well-being

Information & Management, April 2026 

Mohamed Hédi Charki, Nabila Boukef, Jose Benitez, Sangseok You, Ajay Mehra, Lionel P. Robert Jr.

Enterprise social media (ESM) is a critical sociotechnical platform for organizational knowledge sharing. While research has extensively studied the antecedents of knowledge contribution on ESM, the consequences for the contributor have received little attention. We address this by investigating how knowledge-sharing behaviors on ESM affect the psychological well-being of contributors. Our study draws on data from surveys and uses digital trace data from a corporate ESM to supplement the analysis. Crucially, we distinguish the effects of work-related knowledge contributions (e.g., help with a work project) from those of nonwork-related contributions (e.g., advice on recovering after running a semi-marathon). This study offers a new, contributor-centric perspective on ESM, demonstrating its value beyond knowledge seeking. We also show that nonwork-related knowledge contributions are a significant positive trigger for employee well-being. Finally, we reveal that contributing knowledge on ESM is positively associated with the contributor’s own learning, a process that goes beyond vicarious learning.

The Transparency Gap: What’s Missing from Qualitative Research Reporting in Information Science?

Information Matters, February 2026

Rebecca D. Frank, Adam Kriesberg

How do Information Science researchers describe their use of qualitative methods? What do they say about their approach to different steps in the research process such as dates of data collection, people involved in the research process, and whether they’ve obtained ethics board approval for their work? What information gets left out? These questions lie at the heart of ongoing conversations around trust in research and the reusability of research data across the academic landscape. The field of Information Science encompasses many forms of scholarship which examine the world through the lens of information. As members of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) community, we have benefited greatly from the relationships and networks of scholars employing different methods in order to answer big questions using a variety of research methods.

Reaching across the political aisle: overcoming challenges in using social media for recruiting politically diverse respondents

International Journal of Social Research Methodology, February 2026

Megan A. Brown, Nejla Asimovic, Rajeshwari Majumdar, Lena Song, Laura Huber, Sarah Graham, Abby Budiman, Joshua A. Tucker, Jonathan Nagler

A challenge for survey research is achieving representativeness across demographic groups. We test the extent to which ideological alignment with a survey’s sponsor shapes differential partisan response and individuals’ decisions to participate in a study recruited using Facebook advertisements. While the use of social media advertisements for recruitment has recently increased and offers benefits, it can present difficulties in obtaining politically representative samples. Taking an audit approach, we recruit respondents for a survey through two otherwise identical advertisements associated with New York University (from a liberal state) or the University of Mississippi (from a conservative state). Contrary to expectations, we do not find an asymmetry in completion rates between self-reported Democrats and Republicans based on sponsor, nor do we find statistically significant differences in respondent attitudes between the sponsors when we control for observables. We discuss implications for social media recruitment strategies to enhance the representativeness of online survey samples.

Aspiring towards decency: Collectively and creatively appropriating information communication technology in Havana

New Media and Society, January 2026 

Michaelanne Thomas, Sylvia Darling 

We examine how people collectively and creatively appropriate information communication technology (ICT) in Havana, Cuba to navigate persistent scarcity and pursue a more stable life. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data, we center resolver – an emic term for both an informal acquisition process and a problem-solving mindset-as a dynamic, collective strategy. This practice underpins  aspirations for a “decent” life, locally understood as adequacy, stability, and solidarity. Our findings show ICT appropriation is deeply intertwined with evolving moral judgements and solidarity, requiring continual negotiation of legality, necessity, and communal values. Rather than uniformly empowering, ICT use mediates inclusion and exclusion, highlighting new forms of inequality. By theorizing resolver as recursive and context-dependant process, we provide an analytical lens for examining how digital technologies shape aspirations, collective life, and the boundaries of decency in resource-constrained environments. 

The Trans Game Genre: Sometimes Queer, Always Trans

Epistemic Genres: New Formations of Play, January 2026

Hibby Thach, Oliver L. Haimson

Trans games is not a new genre: Yet only recently have academics started to think and write about trans games as something distinct from the broader category of queer games. Trans games have often been lumped into queer games, despite a large amount of queer games scholarship and media coming from trans game developers. Relegating trans games as a subgenre of queer games, or constantly pairing the two together, asserts queerness as the more important category, leading to conflating aspects of both

that should remain unique, and appropriating some elements of trans games by falsely labeling them as queer. We argue that like queer games, trans games require their own subfield of inquiry. Trans games have become a genre that not only represents the intersection of transness with games, but also exemplifies transitions between game genres. We find that trans games: play with conventional game mechanics and design; are about imagining new possibilities, intimacy and social connection, and deeply personal experiences; and are mainly for smaller indie and/or trans audiences.

The development of just-in-time information acquisition behaviors in Generation X

The Information Society, January 2026

Jon D. Miller, Belén Laspra, Carmelo Polino, Mark S. Ackerman, Glenn Branch, Robert T. Pennock

The ways that humans acquire information is undergoing a fundamental change comparable to the introduction of Gutenberg’s moveable type and printing press and the development of broadcast systems in the twentieth century. In the Internet Era – the first decades of the twenty first century – individuals seek information on subjects that are salient or important to them from sources they trust at the time that they need or want that information. In this analysis, we use a 33-year longitudinal study of Generation X beginning in middle school and extending to midlife to describe how youth and young adults in Generation X build and use the skills and interests necessary to function in a just-in-time information acquisition system.

Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record

JAMA Network Open, January 2026

David A. Hanauer, Gavin C. Raab, Shira N. Hanauer

Emojis are small digital images that visually express emotions, ideas, or concepts. Their use has been reported in health care settings, such as texting between clinicians,1 but we are unaware of studies characterizing emojis within electronic health record (EHR) clinical notes, including patient portal messages.

Impact of Push Notifications on Physical Activity and Sodium Intake Among Patients with Hypertension: Microrandomized Trial of a Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention

Journal of Medical Internet Research, January 2026

Jessica R Golbus, Michael P Dorsch, Yuxuan Chen, Tanima Basu, Evan Luff, Predrag Klasnja, Mark W Newman, Lesli E Skolarus, Walter Dempsey, Brahmajee K Nallamothu

Background: Achieving adequate blood pressure control is challenging for patients and clinicians. Digital hypertension management solutions that use push notifications to promote lifestyle management have been proposed as an approach, but their effectiveness remains unknown.

Objective: This analysis was designed to interrogate the independent and short-term effects of push notifications, tailored to participant and environmental factors, and on physical activity levels and sodium intake among individuals with hypertension.

Methods: The myBPmyLife study was a 6-month randomized controlled trial of participants with self-reported hypertension recruited from an academic medical center and federally qualified health centers. A core component of the intervention consisted of microrandomized push notifications promoting lifestyle modifications that were randomly delivered at 4 daily time points and focused on physical activity and dietary sodium intake. Our primary outcome for this secondary analysis was the step count 60 minutes after a physical activity notification and lower-sodium food choices 24 hours after a dietary notification. This analysis focuses on the results of the microrandomized trial and used a centered and weighted least squares method adapted for 2 or more treatments.

Results: A total of 298 participants were randomized to the intervention arm, of whom 287 had data available for analysis. Participants’ mean age was 59.5 (SD 13.1) years, 138 (48.1%) were women, and 206 (71.8%) were White. Participants were randomized at 187,517 time points over 6 months, which led to 0.96 (SD 0.86) push notifications per day divided between activity (50.4%; SD 0.4) and dietary (49.8%; SD 0.4) notifications. Activity notifications did not increase step count in the 60 minutes after a notification (estimate 1.01, 95% CI 0.98‐1.04; P=.40). Similarly, dietary notifications did not impact the number of lower-sodium food choices in the subsequent 24 hours (estimate 0.93, 95% CI 0.83‐1.04; P=.23), but in exploratory post hoc analyses, did increase mobile app use by 95.5% (95% CI 1.81‐2.10; P<.001), mobile app clicks or searches by 93.7% (95% CI 1.72%‐2.16%; P<.001), and low sodium searches by 113.0% (95% CI 1.73‐2.53; P<.001), all within 60 minutes.

Conclusions: In patients with hypertension, push notifications did not impact short-term physical activity levels or dietary sodium intake but did improve intervention engagement.

Shocks in crowds, networks, and online communities

Handbook of Computational Social Science, December 2025

Danaja Maldeniya, Daniel M. Romero

This chapter examines how individuals and communities navigate exogenous and endogenous shocks in digital environments, using recent insights from computational social science. Digital platforms, including social media, Wikipedia, and GitHub, provide vast amounts of data to analyze human behavior during times of disruption, with some dynamics unique to these settings. We discuss how shocks—ranging from natural disasters and social losses to recognition and attention spikes—act as catalysts for change, sometimes presenting threats and other times creating opportunities. Key themes include the adaptive strategies employed by individuals and groups, the cascading effects of shocks on digital and offline systems, and the interplay between shocks and preexisting network structures. Drawing on a range of case studies, we emphasize the need for a comprehensive framework to study shocks and adaptations across systems, highlighting the interaction between online and offline domains during times of instability. 

Managing trust under dynamic information

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, December 2025 

Fanzheng Yang, Tanya Rosenblat, Weiwei Weng 

We study how interpersonal trust develops and interacts with social identity in dynamic environments using laboratory trust games with noisy feedback about partners’ trustworthiness. Participants fall into three groups based on their initial trust: those with moderate trust update symmetrically, those with low trust are more responsive to positive feedback, and those with high trust react more strongly to negative feedback. Social identity influences which group participants belong to, but does not alter their updating patterns. In anonymous settings, the balance of high- and low-trust individuals makes aggregate updating appear symmetric and Bayesian. When social identity becomes salient through university affiliation disclosure, distinct behavioral patterns emerge. In-group favoritism increases initial trust levels, shifting more participants into the high-trust category and leading to stronger reactions to negative feedback at the aggregate level. Conversely, outgroup conditions result in greater initial distrust and heightened aggregate responsiveness to positive feedback. Therefore, how people update their beliefs about others’ trustworthiness is driven by their starting beliefs. Social identity helps set these initial beliefs, but does not affect how people update. This explains when trust is fragile (when starting high) or resilient (when starting low), highlighting the interplay between our initial biases and how we react to new information.

Physicians’ Use of Electronic Health Record Data Elements and Decision Support Tools in Heart Failure Management: User-Centered Cross-Sectional Survey Study

JMIR Cardio, November 2025 

Mohamed S Ali, Bruna Oewel, Kaitlyn M Greer, Sabah Ganai, Mark W Newman, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, Scott L Hummel, Michael P Dorsch

Background:The management of heart failure (HF) requires complex, data-driven decision-making. Although electronic health record (EHR) systems and clinical decision support (CDS) tools can streamline access to essential clinical information, it remains unclear which EHR elements and tools cardiologists and general medicine physicians prioritize when caring for patients with HF.

Objective: This study aims to identify these elements and tools to improve the user interface design of future EHR applications.

Methods: This study used a user-centered design research approach to understand physician workflows and decision-making needs in HF care. A cross-sectional online survey was administered to 302 physicians, comprising 150 cardiologists (including 15 HF specialists) and 152 general medicine physicians. Respondents reported their use of EHR variables (eg, medication lists, laboratory results, diagnostic tests, problem lists, clinical notes) for decision-making in HF care, as well as their time spent in the EHR before, during, and after patient visits along with their use of predictive models and patient-reported outcome questionnaire. Descriptive analyses, χ2 tests, and t tests were conducted to compare groups, with statistical significance set at P<.05.

Results: A total of 302 health care providers participated in the survey, nearly evenly split between cardiologists (49.7%, 150/302) and general medicine physicians (50.3%, 152/302). Both groups consistently relied on medication lists, vital signs, laboratory results, diagnostic tests, problem lists, and clinical notes for HF decision-making. Cardiologists placed greater emphasis on diagnostic tests for inpatient HF care (mean [SD] overall frequency, 4.66 [0.50] vs 4.44 [0.64]; P=.012) and outpatient HF care (mean [SD] overall frequency, 4.67 [0.55] vs 4.35 [0.71], P<.001). In contrast, general medicine physicians relied more on problem lists for inpatient HF care (mean [SD] overall frequency, 4.63 [0.58] vs 4.43 [0.72], P=.034), with no significant difference in the outpatient setting (P>.05). Both groups underutilized standardized questionnaires and predictive models, with only 20.1% (29/144) of cardiologists and 4.5% (6/133) of general medicine physicians using standardized questionnaires (P<.001)

Conclusions: Both physician groups depend on medication lists, laboratory results, diagnostic tests, and problem lists. Cardiologists prioritize diagnostic tests, whereas general medicine physicians more often use problem lists. Low use of questionnaires and predictive models highlights the need for better integration of these tools. Future EHR design interface should tailor functionalities to accommodate these differing priorities and optimize HF care.

Supporting At-Risk Users Through Responsible Computing 

CCC Visioning Workshop, October 2025

Kevin R.B. Butler, Sunny Consolvo, Katie Siek, Tammy Toscos, Pamela Wisniewski, Haley Griffin, Nazanin Andalibi, Rosa I. Arriaga, Beenish Moalla Chaudhry, Munmun De Choudhury, Jeremy  Epstein, Oliver L. Haimson, Sharon Heung, Zaidat Ibrahim, Patrick Gage Kelley, Vera Khovanskaya, Aqueasha Martin-Hammond, Jessica McClearn, Vivian Genaro Motti, Chinasa T. Okolo, Jessica Pater, Wanda Pratt, Sydney Saubestre, Vincent M.B. Silenzio, Dhanaraj Thakur, Alexandra To, Emily Tseng, Rebecca Umbach

The 2024 Supporting At-Risk Users Through Responsible Computing (SARU) Visioning Workshop — hosted by the NSF-funded Computing Community Consortium (CCC) — convened 49 experts1 from academia, industry, and civil society to address challenges faced by people at heightened risk of technology-facilitated harm. During the workshop and in this report, we use this working definition of “at-risk users”: individuals who experience disproportionate technology-facilitated threats such as online harassment, cyberstalking, and digital exploitation. The workshop sought to establish a sociotechnical research agenda to develop ethical, human-centered computing approaches that protect, empower, and meaningfully support such people. Attendees shared resources, including frameworks and methodologies, for conducting responsible research, ensuring participant and researcher safety, and designing technologies that aim to serve all people.  

Key outcomes included the development of a resource repository, a proposal for an advisory board, and strategies for incentivizing stakeholder engagement across academia, industry, and policymaking. The workshop also emphasized the need for structural changes in research funding, institutional incentives, and policy impact to ensure that computing research actively contributes to the broader landscape of digital safety for all. Moving forward, this initiative aims to build a sustainable, interdisciplinary research community dedicated to mitigating technology-facilitated harm and fostering ethical research and computing practices that center the needs of at-risk users. 

Pre-prints, Working Papers, Articles, Workshops and Talks

The relationship between offline partisan geographical segregation and online partisan segregation

arXiv, December 2025 

Megan A. Brown, Tiago Ventura, Joshua A. Tucker, Jonathan Nagler

Social media is often blamed for the creation of echo chambers. However, these claims fail to consider the prevalence of offline echo chambers resulting from high levels of partisan segregation in the United States. Our article empirically assesses these online versus offline dynamics by linking a novel dataset of voters' offline partisan segregation extracted from publicly available voter files for 180 million US voters with their online network segregation on Twitter. We investigate offline and online partisan segregation using measures of geographical and network isolation of every matched voter-twitter user to their co-partisans online and offline. Our results show that while social media users tend to form politically homogeneous online networks, these levels of partisan sorting are significantly lower than those found in offline settings. Notably, Democrats are more isolated than Republicans in both settings, and only older Republicans exhibit higher online than offline segregation. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on political communication and the homophily of online networks, providing novel evidence on partisan sorting both online and offline. 

Follow Nudges without Budges: A Field Experiment on Misinformation Followers Didn’t Change Follow Networks

arXiv, December 2025 

Laura Kurek, Joshua Ashkinaze, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert

Can digital ads encourage users exposed to inaccurate information sources to follow accurate ones? We conduct a large-scale field experiment (N=28,582) on X, formerly Twitter, with users who follow accounts that spread health misinformation. Participants were exposed to four ad treatments varied on two dimensions: a neutral message versus a persuasive message appealing to values of independence, and a request to follow a health institution versus a request to follow a health influencer. We term this ad-based, social network intervention a follow nudge. The ad with a persuasive message to follow a well-known health institution generated significantly higher click-through rates than all other conditions (Bonferroni-corrected pairwise tests, all p<0.001). Given the overall low click-through rate across treatments and the high cost of digital advertising infrastructure on X, however, we conclude that our proposed intervention—at least in its current ad-based format—is not a cost-effective means to improve information environments online. We discuss challenges faced when conducting large-scale experiments on X following the platform’s ownership change and subsequent restrictions on data access for research purposes.

Platforms as Crime Scene, Judge, and Jury: How Victim-Survivors of Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Report Abuse Online

arXiv, December 2025 

Li Qiwei, Katelyn Kennon, Nicole Bedera, Asia A. Eaton, Eric Gilbert, Sarita Schoenebeck

Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), is mediated through online platforms. Victim-survivors must turn to platforms to collect evidence and request content removal. Platforms act as the crime scene, judge, and jury, determining whether perpetrators face consequences and if harmful material is removed. We present a study of NCII victim-survivors' online reporting experiences, drawing on trauma-informed interviews with 13 participants. We find that platform reporting processes are hostile, opaque, and ineffective, often forcing complex harms into narrow interfaces, responding inconsistently, and failing to result in meaningful action. Leveraging institutional betrayal theory, we show how platforms' structures and practices compound harm, and, in doing so, surface concrete intervention points for redesigning reporting systems and shaping policy to better support victim-survivors

The Ideological Turing Test for Moderation of Outgroup Affective Animosity

arXiv, December 2025 

David Gamba, Daniel M. Romero, Grant Schoenebeck

Rising animosity toward ideological opponents poses critical societal challenges. We introduce and test the Ideological Turing Test, a gamified framework requiring participants to adopt and defend opposing viewpoints, to reduce affective animosity and affective polarization. 

We conducted a mixed-design experiment (N=203) with four conditions: modality (debate/writing) x perspective-taking (Own/Opposite side). Participants engaged in structured interactions defending assigned positions, with outcomes judged by peers. We measured changes in affective animosity and ideological position immediately post-intervention and at 2-6 week follow-up. 

Perspective-taking reduced out-group animosity and ideological polarization. However, effects differed by modality (writing vs. debate) and over time. For affective animosity, writing from the opposite perspective yielded the largest immediate reduction (Δ=+0.45 SD), but the effect was not detectable at the 4-6 week follow-up. In contrast, the debate modality maintained a statistically significant reduction in animosity immediately after and at follow-up (Δ=+0.37 SD). For ideological position, adopting the opposite perspective led to significant immediate movement across modalities (writing: Δ=+0.91 SD; debate: Δ=+0.51 SD), and these changes persisted at follow-up. Judged performance (winning) did not moderate these effects, and willingness to re-participate was similar across conditions (~20-36%). 

These findings challenge assumptions about adversarial methods, revealing distinct temporal patterns: non-adversarial engagement fosters short-term empathy gains, while cognitive engagement through debate sustains affective benefits. The Ideological Turing Test demonstrates potential as a scalable tool for reducing polarization, particularly when combining perspective-taking with reflective adversarial interactions.

Digital Diasporas: How Origin Characteristics and Host-Native Distance Shape Immigrants' Online Cultural Retention

arXiv, November 2025 

Aparup Khatua, David Jurgens, Ingmar Weber

Immigrants bring unique cultural backgrounds to their host countries. Subsequent interplay of cultures can lead to either a melting pot, where immigrants adopt the dominant culture of the host country, or a mosaic, where distinct cultural identities coexist. The existing literature primarily focuses on the acculturation of immigrants, specifically the melting pot hypothesis. In contrast, we attempt to identify the antecedents of the mosaic hypothesis or factors that enhance (or diminish) the propensity for cultural retention among immigrants. Based on Facebook advertising data for immigrants from 8 countries residing in the USA, our findings suggest that greater host-native distance is linked to higher online cultural retention, and while origin country context is statistically significant, its impact is generally smaller.

The Measured Body

Issues in Science and Technology, November 2025 

Mona Sloane, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Emanuel Moss

Redesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications including law enforcement and medical diagnostics.

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