In GUIDE
Bio
Jennifer Kavanagh is a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation and leads RAND's Countering Truth Decay initiative—a research portfolio exploring the diminishing reliance on facts and data in U.S. political and civil discourse. Her work spans defense strategy, international conflict, military interventions, and the intersection of information integrity, media trust, and democracy.
She holds a BA in Government from Harvard (with a minor in Russian Language) and a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, where she participated in an interdisciplinary program. After college, she worked as a research assistant at RAND before pursuing graduate study. She returned to RAND after completing her doctorate and has remained there ever since.
Sources in this wiki
Videos
- Truth Decay (Intelligent Speculation episode #33)
Notes
Kavanagh's work on Truth Decay spans multiple dimensions: historical analysis of how information technologies have disrupted factual grounding in U.S. politics, empirical research on media consumption and the tone/style of news reporting across platforms, and policy analysis of interventions (media literacy, science communication, platform governance). Her research is output-focused—she has shifted from diagnosing the problem to proposing solutions, with particular emphasis on education, institutional reform, and multi-stakeholder approaches.