POPC Terminology

Attitude Crystallization

The stability of individuals' attitudes on a given issue; criticized as more metaphorical than empirically testable.

Bullshit (Frankfurt)

Communication by someone who is entirely indifferent to truth — distinguished from lying, which requires knowing the truth and deliberately contradicting it.

Cheapfakes

Manipulated media created with basic editing tools: splicing, speed changes, miscaptioning, photoshopping.

Cloaked Science

Using scientific jargon to hide a political, ideological, or financial agenda within the appearance of legitimate scientific research.

Cognitive Dissonance

Internal contradiction between two opinions, beliefs, or items of knowledge; people strive toward consistency to reduce the distress it causes.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to seek, interpret, favor, and recall information adhering to preexisting opinions.

Agenda

An issue or event perceived at a particular point in time as high in social or political importance.

Agenda-Building

Process through which the policy agendas of political elites are influenced by a variety of factors including media and public agendas.

Agenda-Setting

Process through which mass media communicates the relative importance of various issues and events to the public. Media tell us what to think about, not what to think.

Ambivalence

Holding multiple conflicting attitudes simultaneously; challenging the notion of fixed positions. A normal condition in public opinion, not an anomaly.

Conspiracy Theory

Claims attributing events or practices to secretive actions of powerful individuals; reflect stable psychological predispositions.

Deepfakes

AI-generated or manipulated videos or images, often created by superimposing faces or voices, used to make public figures appear to say or do things they never did.

Digital Media Literacy

Skills and strategies needed to create, evaluate, and engage critically with digital media content of all forms.

Directionally Motivated Reasoning

Processing information to reach a desired conclusion rather than to be accurate; leads to selective exposure and confirmation bias.

Disinformation

False information deliberately created and disseminated with intent to cause harm.

Echo Chamber

A network of users in which users only interact with opinions supporting their pre-existing beliefs, and they exclude and discredit other viewpoints.

Electoral Forecasting

Attempt to model and predict election outcomes before they happen, using structural factors, public opinion, or combined approaches.

Emotional Contagion

The transfer of emotional states to others without their awareness; can occur without direct interaction or nonverbal cues.

Emphasis Frame

A frame that highlights different features of an issue (does not necessarily present identical information); the most common type in political communication.

Epistemic Security

Reliably preventing threats to the production, distribution, consumption, and assessment of reliable information within a society (Alan Turing Institute).

Equivalence Frame

Identical information framed differently through logically equivalent but differently phrased language (e.g., '95/100 survived' vs. '5/100 died').

External Validity

The extent to which causal relationships found in an experiment can be generalized to other people, settings, treatments, and outcomes.

Fake News

Information clearly and demonstrably fabricated and packaged to appear as legitimate news; designed to mislead while appearing credible.

Fertile Soil (Populism)

The suitable social and political environment that can be interpreted through a populist lens; conditions (economic crisis, corruption, cultural anxiety) create demand for populist narratives.

Filter Bubble

The phenomenon of being exposed only to information that confirms your beliefs (coined by Eli Pariser), caused by personalization algorithms — passive, unintentional.

Framing

Selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution. Works through resonance with preexisting beliefs.

Homophily

The process by which similar individuals become friends or connected due to their high similarity; 'love of the same'. Types: status homophily (sex, race, education) and value homophily (beliefs, attitudes).

Inoculation Theory

Weakened exposure to misinformation in controlled environments helps people recognize and resist future misinformation — analogous to a vaccine.

Internal Validity

Confidence that the experimental treatment, and not some other factor, caused the observed outcome.

Lateral Reading

Evaluating sources by leaving the original page and checking what other credible sources say about it.

Malinformation

True or partly true information deliberately weaponized to cause harm (e.g., publishing private information, using content out of context).

Manichean Worldview

Understanding politics as a struggle with only friends and foes; no room for compromise or nuance. Central to populist ideology.

Mediator

A variable that explains the pathway through which a treatment produces its effect.

Misinformation

False information shared unintentionally, with no deliberate intent to harm (wrong dates, stats, captions, satire taken out of context).

Misperception

A factual belief that contradicts the best available evidence, often held with high confidence — distinct from mere ignorance.

Moderator

A variable that specifies the conditions under which a treatment effect varies (stronger or weaker for different subgroups or circumstances).

MRP (Multilevel Regression & Poststratification)

Statistical method: train a multilevel model on polling data, then poststratify by weighting demographic-geographic cells by Census population and anticipated turnout.

Non-attitudes (Converse)

Argument that many individuals lack meaningful attitudes, leading to random survey responses in the absence of any underlying belief.

Nudging

Prompting users to think about accuracy before sharing — the most promising human-focused approach to echo chamber mitigation.

Obtrusiveness

The extent of direct personal experience people have with an issue; obtrusive issues reduce media agenda-setting effects because people already know the issue is important.

Online (OL) Model

A model of voter decision-making in which each new campaign message feeds an online tally that directly updates evaluation; recall plays only a secondary role.

Partisan Identity

Affiliation with a political party, functioning as a social group identity; the most influential and predictive factor in vote choice.

Political Polarization

The divergence of political attitudes to ideological extremes; a key attribute of echo chambers and a consequence of their operation.

Post-Truth Politics

A political context in which facts have lost their role as objective benchmarks; appeals to emotion and personal belief are more influential than evidence.

Prebunking

Preparing people in advance to recognize misinformation techniques, building resistance before exposure occurs.

Priming

The impact of the media agenda on the criteria voters use to evaluate candidates and governments; a consequence of agenda-setting.

Publication Bias

The tendency for statistically significant results to be more likely published, potentially distorting the accumulated scientific record.

Public Opinion (PO)

The result of social processes, embedded in culture; tied to changing historical circumstances; an essential concept in democratic theory.

Rational Irrationality (Caplan)

Voters derive psychological payoffs from world-view-affirming beliefs at no personal material cost but with significant social costs — the incentive structure of democracy enables irrationality.

Random Assignment

Randomly allocating participants to treatment or control groups; the defining feature of an experiment that enables causal inference.

Random Sampling

Selecting participants from a broader population to ensure representativeness; distinct from random assignment.

Recommender Algorithm

Software that uses past user behavior to tailor content recommendations, creating personalized information environments that can trap users in echo chambers.

Resonance (Framing)

The degree to which news coverage connects with individuals' preexisting beliefs about the problem; the mechanism through which frames operate.

Response Instability

The finding that only 45-55% of survey respondents give consistent answers over time; central evidence in Zaller & Feldman's model.

Satire

Humor or fictional news designed to comment on political/social issues; based on some truth but exaggerated. Problematic when shared as real news out of context.

Schema

A cognitive structure abstracted from prior experiences that people use to organize and interpret new information.

Scienceploitation

Use of scientific buzzwords (e.g., 'stem cells') to exploit trust in science and sell products or services without real supporting evidence.

Selective Exposure

The tendency for people to seek out material that supports their existing attitudes and actively avoid material that challenges their views.

SIFT Method

Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to original context — a practical framework for evaluating online information.

Status Homophily

Connection between people based on similar ascribed (sex, race, ethnicity) or acquired (education, religion) characteristics.

Thin-Centred Ideology

An ideology that adopts a restricted core attached to a narrower range of political concepts than 'thick' ideologies (e.g., socialism, liberalism). Populism is a thin-centred ideology.

Value Homophily

Connection between people based on shared values, attitudes, and beliefs, regardless of status differences.

Zaller & Feldman (1992)

Authors of 'A Simple Theory of the Survey Response': survey answers are constructs produced by a stochastic memory search over a set of competing considerations; instability is natural, not merely measurement error.

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