Dr. Danna Young

Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware and Director of the Center for Political Communication where she leads research projects relating to political and media psychology, public opinion, media effects, and democratic health. She has published over sixty academic articles and book chapters on the content, psychology, and effects of political information, satire, and misinformation, and the causes and consequences of partisan division [Go to CV].  Her book Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laugher in the U.S. advances a social psychological framework to account for why political satire skews to the left while opinion programming and talk radio is more successful on the political right (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Her new book, Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation (JHU Press, 2023) examines why human beings are attracted to misinformation, and how the economics and logics of digital and social media rooted in social identity and emotional activation provide ample supply to meet that "demand."  She serves on the Social Science Advisory Council of More Like Us, a non-partisan research-based project to reduce political division by correcting misperceptions about the "other side."

Dr. Young's 2020 TED Talk explaining how our psychology shapes our politics, and how media exploit these relationships, has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has appeared on CNN, PBS Newshour, ABC News, NPR, and various national and international podcasts. As of 2024, her research has been cited in over 120 popular press articles, news stories, and interviews at such outlets as The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, Christian Science Monitor, Variety, the New York Times, the Atlantic, PBS, Slate, and Vox.  

Young was awarded the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award  in 2014.  She holds affiliations with the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center and the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD), where she co-edited of "A Crisis of Civility: Political Discourse and its Discontents" (Routledge, 2018). Her popular University of Delaware course "Propaganda and Persuasion" was released by The Great Courses in 2023.  In recognition of her public facing work, in 2021, Dr. Young became the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Robert M. Entman Award in Democracy and Political Communication from the School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) at The George Washington University.