Lisa Oswald

Lisa Oswald

Professor of Computational Social Science Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) Goethe University

About

I am an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

My research focuses on public discourse in online environments 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. Before joining Goethe University, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of computational social science at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin where I remain a guest researcher.

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 for several years. 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

  • Public opinion, political trust and political polarization.
  • Methodological questions of measurement and causal inference.
  • The public perception of climate change, environmental behavior and science communication.
  • Platform design interventions, content moderation and platform regulation.

Recent publications

Oswald, L., Schulz, W. S., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2025). Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment. Science Advances, 11(50), eady8022. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady8022

Oswald, L. (2025). Effects of Preemptive Empathy Interventions on Reply Toxicity Among Highly Active Social Media Users. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000178

Younger-Khan, S., Weidmann, N. B., & Oswald, L. (2024). Consistent effects of science and scientist characteristics on public trust across political regimes. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03909-2

Oswald, L. (2024). More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03115-0

Lorenz-Spreen, P.*, Oswald, L.*, Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1.

See all publications

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via 🦋Bluesky or 🟦LinkedIn. (You can find me on Mastodon and X but I’m an infrequent visitor there.)