Opinion Science

Alie and Micah Caldwell produce the YouTube channel, Neuro Transmissions . Their videos present the basics of neuroscience and psychology in an accessible, engaging way. Alie is a neuroscientist and senior science writer at the University of Chicago Medicine. Micah is a licensed professional clinical counselor. In our conversation, we talk about the origins of Neuro Transmissions, their philosophy...

Chris Bail is a computational social scientist. He wrangles the data that our social interactions leave behind to better understand how ideas spread. He is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab . A Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, he studies political extremism on social media using tools from the emerging field of computational social sc...

Nazita Lajevardi studies public opinion relating to Muslim Americans. She’s a political scientist and attorney at Michigan State University. In 2020, she published Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia . The book is an extension of her research on public opinion about Muslims in the United States, discrimination faced by Muslim Americans in politics, and the experience of facing...

Dr. Robert Cialdini is an internationally recognized expert on the science of influence. His book Influence is one of the most influential business and psychology books of all time, selling over five-million copies worldwide. As a social psychologist, Cialdini has conducted foundational research on compliance, social norms, and helping behavior. But he is perhaps best known for boiling influence d...

Kwame Christian is an attorney and negotiation expert. He's the director of the American Negotiation Institute where he and his team offer training and consultation for a variety of negotiation needs. He serves as a professor for Otterbein University's MBA program and Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. In his podcast, Negotiate Anything , Kwame talks to experts in negoti...

Dr. Iris Schneider studies the psychology of "ambivalence," which is when we can see both the pros and cons of something. Oftentimes research shows that ambivalence can be problematic, getting in the way of people being able to form a coherent view on something. However, Dr. Schneider suggests that there can be benefits to ambivalence if we're able to see it not as a challenge to ov...

Ken DeMarree studies how opinion science applies how we see ourselves. He’s an associate professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo. In our conversation, we talk about how opinion science can be used to understand things like self-esteem, how people sometimes desire opinions they currently disagree with, and how some people just tend to be pretty confident in their views.   Things we men...

David Melnikoff studies how our goals affect how we feel about things. When stuff helps us reach a goal, we like it…even if it’s not the kind of thing we’d ordinarily like. In our conversation, we talk about what psychologists mean when they talk about people’s “attitudes,” how goals can affect those attitudes, and why all of this means that people can sometimes come to like immoral people.    Thi...

Dr. Ana Gantman studies how people process moral stuff. She’s an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, and she finds that our attention is often drawn more quickly to morally relevant stimuli in our environment. More recently, she’s been looking into how our moral judgments collide with bureaucracy and how we can use moral psychology to address issues surrounding consent and sexual assault.   ...

Dr. Matt Rocklage studies the words we use to express opinions. He’s an assistant professor of marketing the University of Massachusetts-Boston. In our conversation, Matt talks about the Evaluative Lexicon , which is a tool he developed to quantify the language of opinion. Take an online review, feed it into the Evaluative Lexicon, and it’ll tell you how much the person liked or disliked the produ...

Jay Van Bavel studies how our social identities shape the way we see ourselves and the people around us. He’s an associate professor of psychology at New York University. In an upcoming book, he and his colleague, Dominic Packer, present social identity theory . It’s a classic theory in social psychology that has inspired tons of research and continues to give insight into the modern world. At its...

Michael F. Schein is a writer, speaker, and founder of the marketing agency, MicroFame Media . In his new book, The Hype Handbook , he explores the antics of historically successful “hype artists”—cult leaders, music promoters, propagandists, etc.—to extract 12 common strategies that get people excited about and committed to new ideas. In our conversation, we talk about how “hype” is or is not the...

Lara Aknin studies what makes people happy. In particular, she’s spent a lot of time looking at how being generous can improve one’s well-being. She is an associate professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, and you heard her a couple weeks ago on Opinion Science. Her work was featured on our episode on gift-giving, but she has so much interesting work that it seemed setting aside...

Although 2020 will be remembered mostly for annoyances and deeply tragic events, one thing that kept me going this year was starting this podcast. Being able to talk with friends, people I've long admired, and people I had only recently met was a real joy. I wanted to put together an episode with some notable moments in Opinion Science this year. It's not truly a "best of" per...

It’s that time of year when winter holidays send people on a buying spree as they collect gifts to give to every friend, family member, and acquaintance. And you’d think that after so many years of giving gifts for all sorts of holidays, we’d be pretty good at it. Right? Well, not according to research in psychology. In this episode, we explore the psychology of why giving to others is such a good...

Two guests! Drs. Eva Pietri and India Johnson stop by to share the important work they’re doing together on the power of role models for underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Things that come up in this episode: Women and racial and ethnic minorities are under-represented in STEM fields (National Science Board, 2020 ) Encouraging identity-safety in STEM among Black (Johnson, Pietri, Fullilove, &...

Dr. Eric Hehman studies the geography of bias. Lots of research has looked at the prejudice that lives in an individual person’s head, but Eric looks at the average amount of bias in particular location. On average, some counties have more implicit bias than others, and some states have more bias than others. But what does it mean? That’s what Eric and I talk about this week! Things we mention in...

Melanie Green studies stories. She’s a professor of Communication at University of Buffalo, and for years she’s been looking into whether stories can serve to persuade people. Are stories just entertainment or can they change our minds? In this episode, we talk about stories, her research on persuasion, and the experience of being transported by a story. Topics that come up in this episode: People...

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights . For five years, she co-hosted the podcast, The Pollsters , she hosts the SiriusXM show, The Trendline , and the Fox Nation show What Are the Odds? She also regularly appears on television to discuss the latest polls. She’s spent a lot of time looking at polls of Millennials in particular. In 2015, she published her first bo...

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 th...

Vanessa Bohns studies the difference between how much influence people have and how influence they think they have. On the podcast, we talk about her studies, why people underestimate their influence, and whether this means we should try asking for more than we do now. If you sit tight until next year, Dr. Bohns has a book coming out called You Have More Influence than You Think . A few things tha...

Just a quick word about new episodes on the way and a switch to biweekly shows. Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter. Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ .

Elliot Aronson has seen a long and influential career in social psychology. Aronson got his PhD in 1959 from Stanford University, working with Leon Festinger on some of the first experiments testing dissonance theory. He authored a celebrated social psychology textbook, now in its twelfth edition, and he pioneered the research on the jigsaw classroom --"a cooperative learning technique that r...

Last week's special episode on cognitive dissonance pulled together interviews with several people who are experts in the field. Joel Cooper is one of those experts! When I first started getting interested in the social psychology of cognitive dissonance, Joel's book ( Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory ) was so useful. You heard snippets of this interview in last week&ap...

In 1957, Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Along with a collection of compelling experiments, Festinger changed the landscape of social psychology. The theory, now referenced constantly both in and outside of academic circles, has taken on a life of its own. And it’s still informing new research and analysis more than 60 years later. For the grand 20th episode of Opinion S...