Engagement Science Lab

Congratulations to our founder and president, Elizabeth Edwards, on being named a 2026 Top Woman in PR & Communications by PR NEWS — recognized in the Industry Champions category 🎉

Each year, PR News honors an elite group of women shaping the future of communication. The Industry Champions distinction recognizes women whose impact on the direction and advancement of the PR and communications industry reaches well beyond their individual organizations — and that is the work Elizabeth has been doing for twenty-five years.

She is the originator of the Affective Intelligence framework — the convergence-science model that reclassifies the cognitive bias canon as adaptive instinct on spectra and establishes communication as biological intervention rather than information transfer.

She is the originator of PR 3.0, the strategic communication framework for the era in which AI systems synthesize, summarize, and redistribute what is known about every organization.

She was recently elected President of PR Consultants Group, named a featured keynote speaker at Progress MartechNEXT alongside Neil Patel and Scott Brinker, and continues to serve as a lead Behavioral Science Communicator and ethical AI speaker for PRSA, IABC, NSPRA, SPRF, and CAPIO.

What makes Elizabeth an Industry Champion in the truest sense is her conviction that communication is not a soft skill or a nice-to-have, but a science with measurable consequences for human health, organizational trust, and the integrity of public discourse — and that the profession has both the responsibility and the tools to lead the AI era on the right side of that line. 🧠 🎙️ ✨

Honorees will be celebrated at the Top Women Awards Celebration on June 4, 2026, at Current in New York City.

Congratulations, Elizabeth, from all of us at Volume Public Relations, Engagement Science Lab, and The Affect Institute. The industry is better for the work you do, and we are honored to do it alongside you.

More on the 2026 honorees: https://www.prnewsonline.com/go/top-women-in-pr-2026/

If communication shapes the biological conditions under which people can think — then influence is not neutral. And we need a way to tell the difference between communication that helps and communication that harms.

On the left: legitimate influence. Communication that preserves agency, allows complexity, and expands reasoning and choice. Effect: builds system capacity and trust.

On the right: exploitative influence. Communication that triggers urgency and fear, collapses nuance, and compresses processing capacity. Effect: degrades system function and collective reason.

Communication that expands capacity produces durable trust, sustainable engagement, and sound decision-making. Communication that compresses capacity might spike a metric — but it degrades the audience’s ability to reason and trust over time.

As a consumer — judge the media, messaging, and leadership communication you encounter. Is it expanding your capacity or compressing it?

As a communicator — evaluate your own work. Are you building coherence or distorting instinct?

The world spent billions on bias training that failed because it framed instincts as defects. It spent decades optimizing engagement without understanding that engagement optimization often means capacity compression at the biological level.

There is a better way. And the framework for it exists. Read the full essay: https://vist.ly/4y7kr

What if confirmation bias isn’t a flaw? 🧠 What if it’s actually the distorted pole of a healthy instinct — one that sits on a spectrum, with adaptive function at the center and conditioned extremes on either end?

Look at this chart. Three instincts. Three spectra. The same structural pattern every time.

Take the first one. At the healthy center: provisional sensemaking — the ability to hold what you know loosely enough to keep learning, but firmly enough to function. You need this every day.

Push it one direction through environments that punish uncertainty, and you get premature certainty. Rigidity. The thing we’ve been calling “confirmation bias.”

Push it the other direction through environments that erode all trust, and you get epistemic collapse. Cynicism. Nothing is knowable.
Same instinct. Two distortions. Neither one caused by a flaw in your wiring. Both caused by the communication environments that conditioned you.

Now look at the third spectrum — epistemic delegation. The healthy center is your ability to decide who’s worth trusting. Distort it one way: blind deference. Distort it the other: reflexive rejection. No one is trustworthy. Every expert is lying. Every institution is corrupt.

Does that sound like anything happening in the world right now?

This is the instinct reclassification at the heart of Affective Intelligence. And it maps across the entire bias canon.

The full framework with the science, the evidence, and what this means for how we communicate, lead, and influence: https://vist.ly/4y5uq