Hang Lu

*For questions related to our graduate program, please contact either me at comm.acgs@umich.edu or our graduate coordinator at comm-grad-coord@umich.edu. 

Hang Lu is a scholar of media psychology whose research lies at the intersection of science, health, environmental, and risk communication (ComSHER), emerging media technologies, and media effects. His research examines how people interpret and respond to media representations of socially consequential issues, with particular attention to the psychological processes that shape persuasion, engagement, information behavior, and policy attitudes. A growing focus of his research concerns AI-generated, manipulated, and otherwise reality-distorting media. He studies how audiences make sense of synthetic and misleading visual content, how features such as humor, entertainment, realism, and emotional appeal shape responses to such content, and how interventions can influence interpretation and downstream effects. This work seeks to understand both the opportunities created by emerging media technologies and the challenges they pose for judgments about authenticity, credibility, and reality.

Across this broader research program, Lu investigates several recurring psychological processes, including emotion, psychological distance, counterarguing, and the stigmatization and destigmatization of social groups. His work increasingly combines experimental research with the analysis of large-scale digital and social media content, including textual and visual features of social media messages. Lu has examined these questions across a range of science, health, environmental, and social contexts, including climate change, emerging infectious diseases, vaccination, genetically modified food, addiction and recovery, mental well-being, emerging technologies, and human-wildlife conflict.

Lu's research has been published in various peer reviewed journals across disciplines, including Journal of Communication, Journal of Environmental Psychology, New Media and Society, Risk Analysis, Renewable Energy, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Climatic Change, Public Understanding of Science, Science Communication, Appetite, and Health Communication. Lu's research has received a dozen top paper awards from the International Communication Association (ICA), the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA).

Lu currently serves as the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan and the Chair of the Environmental Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Lu directs the Media and Risk (MaR) lab at the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the University of Michigan in the fall of 2019, Lu was the Gloria T. and Melvin J. “Jack” Chisum Postdoctoral Fellow in Science of Science Communication at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.