Department of Communication and Culture

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 94 p. 104981-104981 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2026.104981

Global Environmental Change 101 p. 103240-103240 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103240

Journal of Business Research 218 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2026.116573

Current Issues in Work-Integrated Learning (CIWIL) 2(2) p. 52-52 Doi: https://doi.org/10.64775/ciwil.2026.64206

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is frequently framed as integration of theory and practice through collaboration between higher education and workplace organisations. This article examines practice-based bachelor’s and master’s theses as a demanding form of WIL, where workplace relevance and academic assessment must be coordinated around a shared student project. Drawing on 17 semi-structured interviews with academic staff and workplace representatives in Norwegian higher education in business administration and cultural industries, the study analyses how tensions concerning belonging, learning and organising shape the conditions for collaboration in thesis-based WIL. The findings show that collaboration can be experienced as meaningful and workable even when integration remains partial. Integration unfolds less as full alignment than as translation, coordination and adjustment across different academic and organisational criteria. The study shows that the coupling between higher education and workplace organisations is asymmetrical: academic criteria of validity remain central, while organisational relevance must be translated into academically assessable knowledge. Responsibility for managing these tensions is often shifted to individual actors, particularly students and supervisors. Thesis-based WIL is therefore both productive and vulnerable, as it depends on local coordination, individual commitment and informal solutions. The article contributes by conceptualising thesis-based WIL as a loosely coupled arrangement rather than seamless integration

Computers in Human Behavior Reports 24 p. 1-25 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2026.101285

Partisan news media erode cross-partisan trust, but large language models (LLMs) offer a potential means of debiasing such content at scale. Across two pre-registered experiments, we tested whether LLM-generated debiasing of liberal news headlines could improve conservative readers' trust-relevant judgments. Study 1 found that subtle lexical debiasing (replacing emotive words with moderate synonyms) had no effect on any outcome. Study 2 found that a more substantive reframing intervention significantly increased conservatives' perceived trustworthiness, completeness, and willingness to engage with liberal news headlines, without producing a backfire effect among liberals. In Study 1, the intervention produced robust effects across silicon participants simulated with six different models (o3-mini, o3, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4o, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5), whereas it had no impact on human readers. In Study 2, the intervention's effects among silicon participants generally aligned directionally with human responses but were significantly larger for some outcomes, and three models (o3, GPT-4o mini, and GPT-4o) incorrectly predicted a liberal backfire effect absent in humans. Moderation analyses tentatively suggest that the models' implicit theory of who responds to debiasing diverged from the psychological profile that actually predicted human responsiveness. Most strikingly, in Study 2, participants simulated by each of the six models suggested that debiasing effects would be stronger among participants high in political in-group identification. Yet, no such moderation was observed among human participants. Collectively, these findings suggest that LLM-based debiasing can improve cross-partisan receptivity when the intervention targeted ideological framing but not when it was limited to the minimal surface-level substitutions tested in this research — and that current models lack both the quantitative accuracy and qualitative psychological fidelity to evaluate their own interventions without human oversight.