Opinion Science

(Another) special summer series on science communication! Regular Opinion Science episodes will resume in August.Announcing another season of my special podcast mini-series for the summer focused on science communication. I wanted to talk to a bunch of people who have become experts at communicating research outside of academia through different forms of media.So whether you’re an academic who wants to communicate your research more widely, a journalist interested in covering more social science topics, or just someone in the world who’s looking to be a better communicator, I think you’ll find a ton to like this series.Just stay subscribed to Opinion Science to get this summer series. All episodes in the series will also be available online at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/hot-scicomm-summer/For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Dr. Dannagal Young studies political humor. She pulls together psychology, communications, and political science, to understand how political satire works to change minds and expand political knowledge. She also has a new book: Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States, which explores how satire became a tool of political left and outrage media because a tool of the political right.Update: This episode was replayed on June 5th, 2023 and contains an extra interview at the end about some newer work. Danna's TED talk came out in 2020. She just released a full lecture series on Propaganda and Persuasion through The Great Courses. And later this year, you can read her new book Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation (out October 17, 2023).Some things that come up on this episode:Daily Show viewers were particularly well-informed about the 2004 election (Young, 2004)Jon Stewart defending the Daily Show on Crossfire (2006)Jokes lead people to suspend critical thinking about a message (Polk, Young, & Holbert, 2009; Young, 2008)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Erin O’Mara Kunz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Dayton. We spend the whole episode on her new paper analyzing racial and gender biases in the voting decisions on the reality TV show, Survivor. We dig into how Survivor is a useful test case for understanding discrimination, what the data tell us, and what conclusions we can take away.Things that come up in this episode:In the intro, I mention that social scientists are no strangers to analyzing decisions in televised game shows. These include analyses of  bets placed on the show Jeopardy! (Metrick, 1995), choices on Deal or No Deal (Post et al., 2008), and bids on The Price is Right (e.g., Berk et al., 1996)Erin's new paper analyses trends over 40 seasons of Survivor (Kunz et al,. in press)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Leor Hackel studies how we learn about other people and how we make decisions about them. He’s an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, and he uses neuroscience, economic games, and computational models to sort out what’s going on in our heads as we’re getting information about other people. Things that we mention in this episodeDolf Zillmann's disposition theory (Zillmann & Cantor, 1972; 1996; also see affective disposition theory [Wiki])The difference between "reward associations" and "trait impressions" in how we learn about other people (Hackel et al., 2020; 2022), including differences in brain processes (Hackel et al., 2015)People will give more to someone who gave them more, even if that person is just as "generous" a person as someone who gave less (Hackel et al., 2018)We can form impressions of others is various sorts of "gist" memories (Hackel et al., in press)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

This week, I'm happy to reshare my conversation with political scientist, Alex Coppock. This episode first ran on October 12, 2020, and just a few months ago, Alex published his book, "Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics." The book nicely aligns with our conversation on the podcast, so it seemed like a good reason to reshare the original episode. Enjoy! See you in a couple weeks with a brand new episode. Original Episode: #22 - Political Persuasion with Alex Coppock---Alex Coppock is an assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research considers what affects people's political beliefs, especially the kinds of messages people regularly encounter--TV ads, lawn signs, Op-Eds, etc. In this episode, he shares the findings of a big, new study that just came out as well as what it means for how persuasion works. Things that came up in this episode:A new study testing dozens the efficacy of dozens of political ads (Coppock, Hill, & Vavreck, 2020)The long-lasting effects of newspaper op-eds on public opinion (Coppock, Ekins, & Kirby, 2018)The effects of lawn signs on vote outcomes (Green, Krasno, Coppock, Farrer, Lenoir, & Zingher, 2016)Framing effects in persuasion (for an overview, see Chong & Druckman, 2007)The sleeper effect (see here for an overview)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Uma Karmarkar is a decision neuroscientist. She tries to understand how people make decisions when they have too little or too much information, and she uses tools and theories from neuroscience, psychology, and economics. I wanted to get Uma's take on the value of neuroscience in trying to understand consumer behavior. Does looking at brain signals give us anything special when we try to figure out why people buy what they buy, which advertisements are most influential, etc. We talk about the promises and limitations of neuroscience and cover a whole lot of ground in doing so!Things that come up in this episode:The opening example of a neural focus group to identify songs that would become hits is from Berns and Moore's (2012) experiment published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. The other examples were also published studies, including the study on anti-smoking PSAs (Falk et al., 2012) and chocolate brand displays (Kühn et al., 2016). (By the way, I didn't actually just stumbled across those songs in the intro. As with most of the music in the podcast, they came from Epidemic Sound.)Uma has two great summary articles on the role of neuroscience in consumer psychology (Karmarkar & Plassmann, 2019; Karmarkar & Yoon, 2016)And because it came up, I'll plug my one fMRI study on certainty and ambivalence in the brain (Luttrell et al., 2016)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Ben Rosenberg studies how people react to having their freedom threatened. He is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Dominican University of California. In addition to conducting his own studies on this question, he has exhaustively reviewed decades of research on something called "psychological reactance theory." In our conversation, we break down what reactance is, where it comes from, who it applies to, and what questions about it are still unanswered.Things that come up in this episode:2022 set new records for attempts to ban books in the United States (Associated Press, 2023)In the intro, I tell a personal story about book bans in my school district, but don't worry--I have sources (1, 2, 3)Banning books has been linked to increases in sales (e.g., The Hill, 2022)Psychology research has found that censorship can change people's attitudes (e.g., Worchel & Arnold, 1973)Ben and his advisor summarized a long history of research on psychological reactance (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Guy Itzchakov knows how to listen. He's an associate professor in the Department of Human Services at the University of Haifa. He studies the markers of high-quality listening. But it's not that he tries to figure out who listens well and who doesn't. Instead, he's focused on how receiving high-quality listening affects us as speakers. He finds, for example, that when someone really, deeply listens to what we have to say, it provides us with a safe opportunity to explore where we really stand, realizing that the world is more nuanced than our simple opinions make them out to be. In our conversation, Guy shares the hallmarks of quality listening and what impact they have on speakers.Things that come up in this episode:Psychologist Carl Rogers and his pioneering work on person-centric therapy and empathic listening. Sources for the intro included: Boettcher, Hofmann, and Wu (Noba Textbook); Owen (2022); Rogers and Roethlisberger (1952)The markers of good listening: attention, comprehension, and positive intention (see Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022)Being listened to can lead people to openly acknowledge their ambivalence (Itzchakov et al., 2017) while becoming more clear in their views (Itzchakov et al., 2018).Speakers who experienced high-quality listening became less prejudiced in their views of other groups (Itzchakov et al., 2020)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Tessa Charlesworth studies patterns in people’s beliefs and opinions over time, mapping out the minds of a society over decades. She’s currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. In this episode, she shares her work charting changes in the public’s implicit biases over decades and other research looking at the evolution of language over a couple of centuries to track changes in common stereotypes.Also, we mention a previous episode of the show that’s worth checking out: Episode 16: Implicit Bias with Mahzarin BanajiThings that come up in this episode:Tessa has a series of papers on the changes in implicit biases over time (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2022)Decoding gender stereotypes though language analysis (Charlesworth et al., 2021)Tracking stereotypes revealed by the words in books over centuries (Charlesworth et al., 2022)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Maureen Craig studies how we navigate a diverse social world. She's an associate professor of psychology at New York University. In our conversation, she shares her work looking at people's reactions to the ever-increasing diversity of their social environments. How do people react to the news that one day, less than half of the U.S. population will be White? She also shares her other work on who tends to advocate for whom. What makes an "ally"? When do members of one minority group stand up for another minority group? Things that come up in this episode:People often implicitly associate “American” with “White” (see Devos & Mohamed, 2014)According to the U.S. Census, less than half of Americans under 18 are White (AP News, 2021) and less than half of White Americans live in predominantly White neighborhoods (Washington Post, 2022)For a summary of the work on people’s reactions to increasing racial diversity, see Craig et al. (2018)For a summary of the work on solidarity and allyship, check out Craig et al. (2020)People assume that certain racial groups are aligned on specific social and political issues (Craig et al., 2022)Framing inequality in terms of the disadvantaged group prompts more support for action than framing it in terms of the advantaged group (Dietze & Craig, 2021)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.