Dr. Cynthia Peacock is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Communication and Information Sciences. A recent addition to the C&IS faculty, Peacock brings several years of teaching and research experience with her to the position. Her research interests focus on political communication, communication theory and media effects.
Peacock’s work with Dr. Peter Leavitt, a social psychologist and visiting professor at Dickinson College, titled “Engaging Young People: Deliberative preferences in discussions about news and politics” was recently published in SocialMedia + Society.
The pair’s study examined the way college students perceive the online world as a venue for political discussion by analyzing responses from six focus groups conducted with college students across the United States. Guided by deliberative theory, the pair found that young people prefer engaging with others who are knowledgeable and remain flexible and calm during discussions. They also found that young people’s goals for engaging in conversations about politics primarily revolved around sharing information and opinions, and that they tended to prefer civil discourses that focused on commonalities rather than differences between people.
Peacock completed her dissertation, titled “Talking Politics: Political Opinion Expression and Avoidance across Conservative, Liberal, and Heterogeneous Groups,” in 2016 as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to SocialMedia + Society, Peacock has also published work in American Behavioral Scientist and Communication Research Reports. She has also written several grant-funded whitepapers for engagingnewsproject.org and presented research at several top communication conferences around the world.
