She holds a PhD in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) from the Hertie School in Berlin and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin where she remains affiliated as visiting researcher at the Center for Adaptive Rationality. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a MSc degree in Social Data Science, and from the University of Kassel with a BSc and MSc degree in Psychology.

Topics:

• Political communication
• Online public discourse
• Political behaviour
• Public opinion
• Media literacy
• Climate change skepticism
• Trust in science, media, politics
• Exposure to and detection of online misinformation
• Content moderation and platform regulation
• Alternative platform design

Methods:

• Quantitative description
• Digital trace data
• Experiments
• Causal inference
• Large language models

Selected Publications

• Oswald, L., Schulz, W. S., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2025). Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment. Science Advances, 11(50), eady8022. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady8022
• Oswald, L. (2025). Effects of Preemptive Empathy Interventions on Reply Toxicity Among Highly Active Social Media Users. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000178
• Younger-Khan, S., Weidmann, N. B., & Oswald, L. (2024). Consistent effects of science and scientist characteristics on public trust across political regimes. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03909-2
• Oswald, L. (2024). More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03115-0
• Lorenz-Spreen, P.*, Oswald, L.*, Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(1), DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1. 
• Oswald, L. & Bright, J. (2022). How Do Climate Change Skeptics Engage with Opposing Views Online? Evidence from a Major Climate Change Skeptic Forum on Reddit, Environmental Communication, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2022.2071314

Courses at Goethe University Frankfurt

• tbc

Earlier courses

• Introduction to R and the tidyverse (Spring 2022, two-day workshop, Hertie School)
• Introduction to data science (Fall 2021, R-based lab sessions, Hertie School, MSc Data Science for Public Policy)
• Statistical modeling & causal inference (Spring 2021 and Spring 2022, R-based lab sessions, Hertie School, MSc Public Policy)
• Quantitative methods II (Spring 2015 and spring 2016, Tutorium, Univeristät Kassel, BSc Psychology)
• Quantitative methods I (Fall 2015, Tutorium, Univeristät Kassel, BSc Psychology)

N.N. opening postdoc position

Video/audio

• Deutschlandfunk Forschung Aktuell: Online-Diskussionen. Warum manche posten und andere nur still mitlesen (December, 2025)
• Unraveling behavior: a science podcast from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development - How digital media influence political behavior (YouTube / Spotify, September 2024)

Press/writing

• Tech Policy Press: What a New Study Reveals About the "Production-Consumption Gap" on Social Media (November, 2025)
• The Conversation: Is the global decline in democracy linked to social media? We combed through the evidence to find out (November, 2022)
• The New Yorker: How Harmful is Social Media? There's a general sense that it's bad for society - which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers (June, 2022)
• Tech Policy Press: "Cause for Concern" on Role of Digital Media in Decline of Democracy (December, 2021)