Dr. Lukas P. Otto

I am a senior researcher at GESIS -Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, department Computational Social Science. I am currently team leader for the team Designed Digital Data.

Previously, I was acting professor for Political Psychology at the RPTU Kaiseslautern-Landau (2025-2026) and assistant professor for Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research / ASCoR and a PostDoc at the Institute for Communication Psychology and Media Education, University of Koblenz-Landau, where I did my PhD (“Softening trust – Effects of Soft News Characteristics on Trust in Politicians”).

My research focuses on political communication, media psychology, and methods of communication research. More precisely, I am investigating the effects of digital political communication: (a) effects of negativity, incivility, and toxic talk in political communication online, as well as (b) effects of political microtargeting. I am furthermore interested in mobile methods, modeling intensive longitudinal data, and user-centered computational approaches, such as (mobile) tracking data and sensor data, as well as data donations.

My work was published in e.g. Communication Research, Communication Theory, Computational Communication Research, Political Communication, Journal of Communication, Journal of Media Psychology, New Media & Society. I received grants from the Ministry of Research and Education, Rhineland-Palatinate and a PhD scholarship from the German Scholarship Foundation, from Facebook Research (“A global perspective on incivility”), EU-NORFACE (project datadriven campaigning) and recently for the DFG project SCREEN (An integrated, accessible infrastructure for privacy-friendly mobile tracking).

From May 2020-2024 I was secretary of the Political Communication division at the International Communication Association.

I was teaching courses at the bachelor and master level in social sciences, communication science, and psychology, mostly on media reception and effects, political psychology, and general introduction to communication research, as well as social science methods courses.