Olivia Bullock
Assistant Professor | University of Florida
Gainesville, FL, UNITED STATES
Olivia Bullock studies how gaps between experts' beliefs and the public's beliefs can be closed with effective messaging interventions.
Biography
Olivia Bullock publishes articles about proven, evidence-based strategies to engage and persuasively communicate. She uses a quantitative social science approach to run experiments and determine what message features resonate best with particular audiences for specific topics, especially related to health and science information like climate change, nuclear power, sustainable practices, and vaccination. She also has a practitioner background, including serving as a message design consultant for the CDC's "We Can Do This" nationwide COVID-19 vaccine campaign.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Risk Communication (Science, Health, and Technology)
Persuasion
Message Processing
Risk Communication
Articles (3)
“I’m Just Going to Stay Out of the Way”: How Perceived Information Gathering Capacity Influenced Risk Information Seeking and Processing During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Western Journal of CommunicationOlivia Bullock
2023-08-24
When a new risk emerges, people must seek out and process information to help them understand how to manage the risk in their daily lives. The risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model has been used to explain what factors both contribute to risk information seeking and processing behaviors.
Political information search in “noisy” online environments: Insights from an experiment examining older and younger adults’ searches on smartphones and laptops
Journal of Information Technology & PoliticsRyan C. Moore, et. al
2023-03-30
An important problem voters face is that they frequently encounter unfamiliar candidates and policies during elections. The Internet provides a solution to this problem by allowing voters to access vast amounts of information using communication technologies like laptops and smartphones. However, the online environment is “noisy,” containing information both relevant and irrelevant to any given query.
Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections
Political CommunicationHillary C. Shulman
2022-06-23
Two laboratory studies (N = 240) were designed to explain and predict how people make decisions in low-information political environments. Guided by feelings-as-information theory, it was argued that when direct democracy ballot issues do not receive any campaign expenditures and are not about moral/civic issues, voters are likely to encounter these ballots for the first time in the voting booth.
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