Coye Cheshire is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. He studies sociological social psychology and group processes, with a focus in social exchange, cooperation, and trust in technology-mediated environments. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University, and M.A. and B.A. in sociology from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, respectively.
UC Noyce Initiative Research project
“Computational Approaches for Understanding and Intervening Upon Misinformation About Contraception and Abortion on Social Media,” with Anu Manchikanti Gomez from UC Berkeley and Katrina Kimport from UCSF.
Other Current Research
Professor Cheshire mixed methods to examine social scientific issues of interpersonal trust, social exchange, and human motivations in technology-mediated social participation environments. His research aims to advance our understanding of the affordances and limitations of information technologies, and encourage cooperation, trust and prosocial behavior while combating distrust and misinformation. He is especially interested in trust and online harms related to health misinformation, and he is a faculty affiliate with the Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health.
He applies a variety of different social psychological theories to investigate online information problems. His recent projects include:
- trust in online health information,
- affordances and limitations of searching for health information online,
- remediation of online harms for adolescents,
- fairness and sense making about tipping in the gig economy,
- and trust-building in different forms of social exchange.
He strongly believe in using mixed methodological approaches to address complex research problems, including laboratory and field experiments, longitudinal and cross-sectional survey analysis, online behavioral log analysis, and in-depth qualitative interviews. His graduate courses include: social psychology in information technology, quantitative social research methods, social aspects of information, and the doctoral research and theory workshop.