Tiffany Lau

I study how online political messaging shapes trust, polarisation, and intergroup attitudes.

My PhD research examines political polarisation on social media in the United States, and China's foreign-facing state media messaging and its effects on political attitudes and inter-ethnic relations in Malaysia and Singapore. My MSc research studied Russian Internet Research Agency trolls on Reddit.

I use survey experiments, statistical analysis of survey data, text analysis using large language models, and qualitative interviews in my work.

Working Papers

• The Effects of Exposure to Polarised Political Views Online on Generalised Trust in the US
  Under review, Political Science Research and Methods
  Using a survey experiment with around 2,000 US respondents, I test whether exposure to polarised political comments on social media affects generalised trust. I designed a novel treatment based on real comments I collected from Facebook to vary the level and type of polarisation respondents were exposed to. While exposure to highly polarised comments had no significant effect on generalised trust, it increased respondents' perceptions of polarisation, both online and offline. [Link to paper]
• China's Foreign-Facing State Media Messaging and its Effects on Political Attitudes in Malaysia
  Using large language models to analyse over sixteen thousand China Global Television Network articles, I design video treatments for a survey experiment testing the effects of exposure to state media messaging on political attitudes and inter-ethnic relations.
• The Dynamics of Diaspora Politics: Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese Identities in the Age of Rising China
  Using Asian Barometer Survey data and in-depth interviews, I examine whether being 'pro-China' constitutes a coherent set of political attitudes among Singaporean and Malaysian Chinese. [Blog version]

Teaching