About

Marcus Mann is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University, having joined the faculty in 2019. He earned his Ph.D. at Duke University. His primary research interests include political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and social movements. Currently, he is working on projects that examine how knowledge in various domains is mediated in online contexts. He employs computational approaches such as the collection and analysis of digital trace data, big data processing, and text analysis methods. His research has been published in reputable journals including The American Sociological Review, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Forces, and Social Problems.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Law
• Public relations
• Political economy
• Media studies
• Literature
• Art

Selected publications

• Beyond Polarization: Right-Wing News as a Quasi-Religious Phenomenon

  2025-02-27 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Research on U.S. political media has demonstrated that mainstream and right-wing news are qualitatively distinct in a variety of ways. However, the dominant paradigm of political polarization and its attendant assumptions have restricted researchers from putting these descriptive insights into new and potentially generative theoretical context. In this article, we propose a way forward, arguing for the merits of conceptualizing right-wing news as a quasi-religious phenomenon. Putting empirical findings in dialogue with core theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argue that the right-wing news ecosystem has epistemic, functional, and ecological features that are more characteristic of religion than its mainstream media counterpart. We illustrate the usefulness of these distinctions by applying them to the case of Fox News and their reporting of the 2020 presidential election. Finally, we discuss how our conceptual framework advances current and future research on mis/disinformation, international politics, and the structural causes and consequences of right-wing news media’s ascendance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Role of (Mis)Perceptions of Others’ Institutional Trust in Partisan Group Identity Formation

  Advances in group processes · 2025-11-14

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Purpose The decline of institutional trust in the United States is a concerning trend that will frustrate collective action if not reversed. In this study, the authors build on scholarship on political polarization, in-group identity, and third-order beliefs (i.e. beliefs about others’ beliefs) to propose that partisans will perceive that the general public will have less trust in the institutions they themselves trust. Methodology The authors test the authors’ argument by collecting a survey of Republicans and Democrats where the authors measure their trust in US institutions and their perceptions of the general public’s trust in those institutions. The authors then compare these measures to those in the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS). Findings The authors find that Democrats have greater trust in Knowledge institutions than Republicans and perceive the general public to have lower trust than they do in these institutions, while Republicans have greater trust in Traditional institutions and perceive the general public to have lower trust than they do in these institutions. The authors find that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of the general public’s trust in their own trusted institutions is lower than established levels in the GSS. Originality The authors argue that perceptions of the beliefs and values of one’s in-group being out-of-step with wider society is an important aspect of in-group identity. The author measure both participants’ first-order institutional trust and their perceptions of the general public’s institutional trust in the same sample, permitting analyses that uncover differences between the two and between political partisans.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Polarization: Right-Wing News as a Quasi-religious Phenomenon

  Sociological Theory · 2025-03-29 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research on U.S. political media has demonstrated that mainstream and right-wing news are qualitatively distinct in a variety of ways. However, the dominant paradigm of political polarization and its attendant assumptions have restricted researchers from putting these descriptive insights into new and potentially generative theoretical context. In this article, we propose a way forward, arguing for the merits of conceptualizing right-wing news as a quasi-religious phenomenon. Putting empirical findings in dialogue with core theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argue that the right-wing news ecosystem has epistemic, functional, and ecological features that are more characteristic of religion than its mainstream media counterpart. We illustrate the usefulness of these distinctions by applying them to the case of Fox News and their reporting of the 2020 presidential election. Finally, we discuss how our conceptual framework advances current and future research on mis/disinformation, international politics, and the structural causes and consequences of right-wing news media’s ascendance.

  PublisherDOI

• Blurred Authorities: How Exposure to Conflicting Accounts Increases Strong Democrats’ Openness to Partisan Conspiracy Narratives

  Poetics · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Unsorted Significance: Examining Potential Pathways to Extreme Political Beliefs and Communities on Reddit

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2023 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Violent political extremists often point to online communities as motivating their behavior. However, researchers studying online exposure to extremism through structural mechanisms such as algorithms have not found strong evidence of their influence. At the same time, models of offline radicalization processes emphasize the importance of personal motivations, such as desire for significance and community, but do not fully account for online contexts. The authors integrate these approaches, which are both interested in worsening political extremism, asking, (1) What are the pathways to extreme content and communities online? and (2) What are the perceptions of extremism in online communities? Through interviews with politically active Redditors, the authors identify three motivations for initial engagement with fringe political communities: political unsorting of the self, political exceptionalism, and virtuous participation. The authors argue these motivations are potentially important seeds of political extremism and discuss the implications for supporting healthy political discourse online.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• PATHWAYS TO RADICALISM: EXAMINING ONLINE COMMUNITY AND POLITICAL PATHWAYS TO MORE RADICAL BELIEFS ON REDDIT

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2023

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Social psychology

  Recent research shows that “algorithmic radicalization” and “echo chambers”—the idea that recommendation algorithms on social media have a strong independent effect on radicalization and silo people into ideologically homogeneous communities—are not as prevalent nor influential as once feared. Yet, online political discourse is as toxic as ever while political misinformation continues to plague social media platforms. This begs the question: If algorithms aren’t encouraging radicalization, then what is producing it? Drawing from church-sect theory, this study interviews politically active Reddit users to better understand _how_ they arrived at their current media use, online engagement, and political beliefs. Results show that participants have a deep mistrust of mainstream media, leading them to seek alternative sources of political content. Reddit participation is also driven by a desire for “earnest” political discussions with like-minded individuals and cross-partisans, in part to “reject” partisan polarization. Despite engaging on more extreme subreddits, participants said their beliefs were unchanged, but that other Redditors had moved to more extreme beliefs over time. And, participants perceived their Reddit participation as necessary to _prevent_ radicalization and partisan polarization. Collectively, these results provide preliminary insight into the media and social/psychological pathways that could lead to online radicalization, providing an alternative explanation to algorithmic radicalization. This study also underscores the importance of interrogating the ecological pathways to radicalization for researchers and policy-makers; future interventions should account for attribution bias and the individual-level factors related to radicalization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sharing Stories, Sharing Bias: How Descriptions of Context Shape Negative Stereotype Use in Response to Accounts of Economic Adversity

  Social Problems · 2019-12-13 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Research shows that observers use negative stereotypes to construe victims of misfortune as responsible for their own fate. In two experiments, we test three situational characteristics’ (injustice, scale, and control) effects on observers’ tendency to use negative stereotypes when communicating stories about others’ economic hardship. Study 1 examines predictions, based on social psychological theories of equity and justice, that stereotype use should increase in response to accounts of misfortune that are the result of unjust under-reward. Contrary to predictions, Study 1 found that participants used more stereotypes when retelling accounts in which the protagonist’s misfortune was not the result of unjust rewards. Study 2 investigates competing predictions to Study 1, based on research regarding how portrayals of scale (whether the misfortune affects one vs. many) and control (whether another actor has control over the misfortune of another) affect perceptions of misfortune. Study 2 results indicate that stereotype use increases in response to accounts of large-scale, uncontrollable misfortune. Together, these studies suggest that qualities of portrayals (such as scale and control) are crucial in understanding stereotype transmission processes above and beyond the role of perceptions of injustice (i.e., the unequal distribution of rewards).

  PublisherDOI

• Love the Science, Hate the Scientists: Conservative Identity Protects Belief in Science and Undermines Trust in Scientists

  Social Forces · 2019-11-02 · 148 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The decline in trust in the scientific community in the United States among political conservatives has been well established. But this observation is complicated by remarkably positive and stable attitudes toward scientific research itself. What explains the persistence of positive belief in science in the midst of such dramatic change? By leveraging research on the performativity of conservative identity, we argue that conservative scientific institutions have manufactured a scientific cultural repertoire that enables participation in this highly valued epistemological space while undermining scientific authority perceived as politically biased. We test our hypothesized link between conservative identity and scientific perceptions using panel data from the General Social Survey. We find that those with stable conservative identities hold more positive attitudes toward scientific research while simultaneously holding more negative attitudes towards the scientific community compared to those who switch to and from conservative political identities. These findings support a theory of a conservative scientific repertoire that is learned over time and that helps orient political conservatives in scientific debates that have political repercussions. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers interested in the cultural differentiation of scientific authority and for stakeholders in scientific communication and its public policy.

  PublisherDOI

• How Political Differentiation of Knowledge Authority Affects Public Understandings of Science and Political Media

  2019-01-01

  dissertation1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media

  2018-03-21 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access

  There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating "echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to a treatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages produced by elected officials, organizations, and other opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies. Respondents were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-treatment. These findings have important implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization as well as the emerging field of computational social science.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Taylor Brown

  3 shared

• Ryan T. Cragun

  University of Tampa

  3 shared

• Christopher A. Bail

  Duke University

  3 shared

• M. B. Fallin Hunzaker

  3 shared

• Haohan Chen

  Sichuan University

  2 shared

• Emily Ku

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared

• Alexander Volfovsky

  Duke University

  2 shared

• Diana Zulli

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  2 shared