Miriam Sorace

🚨 Please send in your application by 10 December to be considered for this ESRC studentship in collaboration with @campaign-lab.bsky.social. Both home and international students are eligible for funding. Some advice on how to apply below 👇

Second POAL methods brief by amazing @laurenleek.eu on how leading polling and survey providers deal with AI bots with tips for researchers fielding their own surveys too!

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? - Impact of Social Sciences Are nano-targeting tools capable of creating more persuasive climate communications, or broad appeal messages still the best way to move audiences on climate?

👀ICYMI: "Increasing support for climate action does not require sophisticated, ethically questionable or costly communication systems"

@miriamsorace.bsky.social @simonhix.bsky.social @fresejoris.bsky.social

#CilmateAction #SciComm #COP30

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? - Impact of Social Sciences Are nano-targeting tools capable of creating more persuasive climate communications, or broad appeal messages still the best way to move audiences on climate?

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications?

@miriamsorace.bsky.social @lsedatascience.bsky.social, Thomas Robinson @lsemethodology.bsky.social, @simonhix.bsky.social @epssnet.bsky.social and @fresejoris.bsky.social @eui-eu.bsky.social for @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? - Impact of Social Sciences Are nano-targeting tools capable of creating more persuasive climate communications, or broad appeal messages still the best way to move audiences on climate?

💥New: Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications?

✍️ @miriamsorace.bsky.social,Thomas Robinson, @simonhix.bsky.social & @fresejoris.bsky.social

#COP30 #ClimateComms #NanoTargeting

"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts."

Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson!

Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...

The Public Opinion Analytics Lab (POAL) is a collaboration by Southampton, Reading, and the LSE to leverage our strengths in public opinion research for academia and beyond. Today we've published our first methods brief— a short primer on conjoint experiments by the fantastic Thomas Robinson (LSE).

Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications? - Impact of Social Sciences Are nano-targeting tools capable of creating more persuasive climate communications, or broad appeal messages still the best way to move audiences on climate?

🌎New @lseimpactblog.bsky.social: Nano-targeting or mass appeal, what makes persuasive climate communications?

Thomas Robinson, @miriamsorace.bsky.social @simonhix.bsky.social & @fresejoris.bsky.social explore how new tools make targeting individuals at scale with tailored communications possible

👉

🚨 EPSS Belfast 2026 Call for Papers - One week to go! 🚨

Don't forget to submit your paper or panel proposal to the European Political Science Society @epssnet.bsky.social 2026 conference - just one week to go before the deadline: epssnet.org/belfast-2026...

Nano-targeting is not a persuasive weapon: it is a dissuasion and polarization weapon. New paper out osf.io/preprints/so... with the brilliant Thomas Robinson, @simonhix.bsky.social and @fresejoris.bsky.social – the first to quantify the perverse incentives/inherent democratic dangers of this tech.

@poalab.bsky.social
@uniofreading.bsky.social @lseimpactblog.bsky.social @eui-sps.bsky.social

Key Takeaways:
➡️ Nano-targeting isn't great for positive persuasion: broad appeals work best.
➡️ It's more useful for dissuading or attacking, by targeting people with what they dislike most.
➡️ It can help mobilize the ‘already converted’.
This explains why anti-system actors are most likely users.

Most-disliked messages had stronger dissuasive effects than most-liked messages had persuasive ones – suggesting nano-targeting may be more effective for dissuasion and de-mobilization than persuasion.

To quantify dissuasion effects, we turned to the control group respondents (N=1,000). By virtue of randomization, some individuals received – by chance – climate messaging that they personally disliked (mis-targeted), and some messaging that they liked (akin to the nano-targeted treatment).

Uniquely, our study does not simply test the persuasive effects of nano-targeting, but also its polarizing and dissuasive effects. We found that nano-targeting exacerbates polarization: nano-targeting was most persuasive among already pro-climate respondents and not among the undecideds/moderates.

This is great news for climate policy communication: we for example moved overall likelihood to sign an emission reduction petition to 52% with the best climate policy message, without the need for overly sophisticated message tailoring pipelines or to selectively hide policy pledges.

We find that – on all our measures of persuasion – the nano-targeted group **never** out-performs the best climate message outlined above (i.e. positive + energy security frames; tax incentives on sustainable buildings, energy and trade; investment in sustainable transport and farming)

For phase two (message testing), we partnered with @opiniumresearch.bsky.social to randomly assign respondents to: nano-targeted messages, the best-performing climate message, or a control condition where each individual received a bespoke but non-targeted climate policy message.

We then nano-target by training a predictive model (xgboost) on first-phase conjoint data, predicting petition support by interacting policy components with individual demographics, past vote and vote intention.

The calibration stage – run with @yougov.co.uk - shows that the best climate policy messaging has an optimistic frame and highlights energy security benefits, proposes tax incentives on sustainable buildings, trade and renewable energy and investment on the transport and natural investment sector.

We use climate policy to illustrate and test the technique in the strongest, most realistic, and most ethical way possible, given its multi-dimensionality, the strong heterogeneity in sub-dimension support, and a clear uni-directional goal (emissions reduction) seen as a public good.

We first illustrate nano-targeting as a technology, which calibrates messaging via conjoint analysis on natl representative samples and then applies eXtreme Gradient Boosting (xgboost) predictive modelling to assign the nano-targeted climate policy messages to individuals from a separate sample.

Micro-targeting is seen as persuasive weapon, but experiments shows it underperforms broad appeal messaging. We introduce and test ‘nano-targeting’ a deeper micro-targeting approach which is now increasingly scalable. Is this blend of micro-targeting and message sub-units tailoring more effective?

Nano-targeting is not a persuasive weapon: it is a dissuasion and polarization weapon. New paper out osf.io/preprints/so... with the brilliant Thomas Robinson, @simonhix.bsky.social and @fresejoris.bsky.social – the first to quantify the perverse incentives/inherent democratic dangers of this tech.

A major step forward for large-scale survey research from our own Thomas Robinson & @patricksturg.bsky.social: SOCbot is a powerful AI tool for open-ended survey items—fast, cheap, reduces burden, and tackles longstanding measurement error in social science & labour stats
Paper: tinyurl.com/2yxcbshs

LSE Collaborative Studentship with Campaign Lab LSE Collaborative Studentship with Campaign Lab

ESRC-funded PhD @lsegovernment.bsky.social × Campaign Lab: New Ways to Think Political Persuasion (start Sep 2026, 3.5 yrs)

Methods-heavy (experiments/computation)

Topics: multi-stage persuasion, interpersonal mechanisms, AI–voter interactions

📅Apply by 10 Dec 2025: www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse...

Looking forward for my postdocs and I to host the Oxford-London Environment and Public Policy workshop at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, tomorrow (October 1st).

Thanks to @politicsoxford.bsky.social, @lsegovernment.bsky.social, and @leverhulme.ac.uk for support 💫

So many cool papers!

Are you, or do you know, someone who wants to do a PhD?

Applications are open for full funding (scholarship + maintenance) @sotonpolitics.bsky.social through the @scdtp.bsky.social

Get in touch if you're interested

southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/

You have work on politics in Europe, European integration or the EU?

Submit it to next year's @epssnet.bsky.social conference section on "European and EU Politics“ 👇

@bjornhoyland.bsky.social & I are open to diverse proposals with a European dimension.

Delighted to feature in the latest issue of Political Insight! My piece describes how data-driven campaigning works in practice, challenges the dystopian narratives surrounding it, and outlines key safeguards to ensure that these techniques enhance - rather than undermine - democracy.