About

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the field of computational social science at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. My research focuses on public discourse in online enviornments and the role of digital media for democratic politics. While integrating psychological and political science perspectives, I aim to use digital trace data and online experiments to better understand social phenomena such as climate change skepticism, online hate speech and political polarization.

I hold a PhD in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from the Hertie School in Berlin. Previously, I graduated from the University of Oxford, UK, with a MSc degree in Social Data Science, and from the University of Kassel, Germany, with a BSc and MSc degree in Psychology. I worked as a teaching assistant for the MSc courses “Introduction to Data Science” of the MSc in Data Science for Public Policy and for the course “Statistical Modeling & Causal Inference” of the policy analysis track at the Hertie School. Before that, I worked as a research consultant at the Hertie School’s Data Science Lab and at the Center for Environmental Systems Research (CESR) in Kassel.

I am futher interested in

  • The public perception of climate change, the psychology of sustainable behavior and science communication.
  • Public opinion, political polarization, conspiracy myths and online extremism.
  • Human-technology interaction, especially risk perception and technology acceptance in the face of crises (e.g. climate engineering and Covid contact tracing).

Most recent work

Oswald, L. (2023). Effects of Preemptive Empathy Interventions on Reply Toxicity among Highly Active Social Media Users. SocArXiv

Lorenz-Spreen, P.*, Oswald, L.*, Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2022). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1.

Oswald, L., Munzert, S., Barberá, P., Guess, A., and Yang, J. (2022). Beyond the tip of the iceberg? Exploring Characteristics of the Online Public with Digital Trace Data. SocArXiv

Oswald, L. (2022). More than News! Mapping the Deliberative Potential of Political Online Ecosystems with Digital Trace Data. SocArXiv

Oswald, L. (2022). Automating the Analysis of Online Deliberation? A Comparison of Manual and Computational Measures Applied to Climate Change Discussions. SocArXiv

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