Mohamed A. Hussein

I study the supply side of communication. In one stream of research, I uncover novel communication strategies used by political campaigns and examine their effectiveness. In a second stream of research, I investigate how practitioners choose their communication strategies and when and why their beliefs about what works are miscalibrated.

My research on political campaigns was the first to document the use of ads to manipulate the opposing party’s primary (meddle ads) and how people respond to them. Recently, I have studied ads in which candidates attack their own party (party-defiance ads), as well as the rise of ads that portray candidates as “anti-establishment.”

My research on practitioners examines marketers’ beliefs about what makes an ad persuasive and where those beliefs align with, or diverge from, observed effectiveness. I also study how marketers understand the relationship between engagement and persuasion, and how those beliefs shape which ads they choose to launch.

My earlier work examined how people navigate politics in everyday life: For example, I have studied the reputational consequences of being open to opposing political views, how identity shapes choice of extreme candidates, and how seemingly trivial changes in language (e.g., swapping out “you” with “we”) can impact persuasion in contentious political debates.

My research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. It has received numerous awards, including the Ferber Award Honorable Mention for the best dissertation-based article in marketing.

I received my PhD from Stanford University, where I was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Before that, I studied Economics and Mathematics at Middlebury College.