I am an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Psychology at Cornell University. I am also in
the Department of Government and on the graduate field faculty in Information Science.
I study politics and health, focusing on the social spillover effects of government actions and how small groups of people adapt to sudden changes in their lives.
My recent projects have studied the development of public attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act, how social networks heal after a death, and unintended consequences of online censorship in China.
My work has been published in the American Political Science
Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal
of Politics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, among other outlets. It has also been covered in
popular media, including The
Atlantic, Science Magazine, The New York Times,
the Los
Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Working Papers
Despair or Defiance? Assessing Turnout Effects of Election Misinformation
Jon Green,
William Hobbs,
Stefan McCabe, and
David Lazer. 2021. (revise and resubmit)
Asymmetric Flooding as a Tool for Foreign Influence on Social Media
Alexandra Cirone and
William
Hobbs. 2020. (forthcoming, Political Science Research and Methods)
Group Salience, Inflammatory Rhetoric, and the Persistence of Hate Against Religious Minorities
William Hobbs,
Nazita Lajevardi,
Xinyi Li, and
Caleb Lucas.
Text Scaling for
Open-Ended Survey Responses and Social Media Posts
William Hobbs. 2019.
R package: parrot (install from
github).
Publications
COVID-19 increased censorship circumvention and access to sensitive topics in China
Keng-Chi Chang,
William Hobbs,
Margaret Roberts, and
Zachary
Steinert-Threlkeld. 2022.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (4): e2102818119.
Offsetting
Policy Feedback: Evidence from the Affordable Care
Act
William Hobbs and Daniel
Hopkins. 2021.
Journal of Politics. 83 (4): 1800-1817.
Using Administrative Records and Survey Data to Construct Samples of Tweeters and Tweets
Adam Hughes,
Stefan McCabe,
William Hobbs,
Emma Remy,
Sono Shah, and
David Lazer. 2021.
Public Opinion Quarterly 85 (S1): 323-346.
Effects of the 2016 Presidential Campaign on the Day-to-Day Segregation of Arab and Muslim Americans
William Hobbs and Nazita
Lajevardi. 2019.
American
Political Science Review.
113 (1): 270-276.
Major Life Events and the Age - Partisan Stability Association
William Hobbs. 2019.
Political
Behavior. 41 (3): 791-814.
How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information
William Hobbs and Margaret Roberts. 2018.
American Political Science Review. 112 (3): 621-636.
ConStance: Modeling Annotation Contexts to Improve Stance Classification
Kenneth Joseph,
Lisa Friedland,
Oren Tsur,
William Hobbs, and
David Lazer. 2017.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) '17.
Voters of the Year: 19 Voters Who Were Unintentional Election Poll Sensors on Twitter
William Hobbs,
Lisa Friedland,
Kenneth Joseph,
Oren Tsur,
Stefan Wojcik, and
David Lazer. 2017.
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) '17. 544-547.
Connective Recovery in Social Networks After the Death of a Friend
William Hobbs and Moira Burke. 2017.
Nature: Human Behaviour. 1 (5).
--
Science
--
The Atlantic
--
UC San Diego press release
Online Social Integration is Associated with Reduced Mortality Risk
William Hobbs, Moira Burke, Nicholas Christakis, and James Fowler. 2016.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113 (46): 12980-12984.
--
New York Times
--
Los Angeles Times
--
UC San Diego press release
-- Altmetric 2016 Top 100
Presidential Effort and International Outcomes: evidence for an executive bottleneck
David Lindsey and William Hobbs. 2015.
Journal of Politics. 77(4): 1089-1102.
--
supporting information
--
replication materials
Widowhood Effects in Voter Participation
William Hobbs, Nicholas Christakis, and James Fowler. 2014.
American Journal of Political Science. 58(1): 1-16.
--
supporting information
--
replication code (email me for updated code in Python)
--
The Atlantic
Prediction of Mortality Using On-line, Self-Reported Health Data: empirical test of the RealAge score
William Hobbs and James Fowler. 2014.
PLOS ONE. 9(1): e86385.
--
supporting information
Embedded Interests and the Managerial Local State: the political economy of methanol fuel-switching in China
Genia Kostka and William Hobbs. 2013.
Journal of Contemporary China. 22(80): 204-218.
Local Energy Efficiency Policy Implementation in China: bridging the gap between national priorities and local interests
Genia Kostka and William Hobbs. 2012.
China Quarterly. 211: 765-785.
Education
Graduate
University of California, San Diego
PhD '16 in Political Science (2011-2016)
- Institute for Network Science, Yale University (2013 - 2014)
- Data Science team, Facebook, Inc. (2013)
Undergraduate
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA '09 in Economics, Asian Studies
