Opinion Science

Jae-Hee Jung is an assistant professor at Rice University, where she studies party politics, political behavior, and political psychology in Western democracies. Her research focuses on the strategic use of moral rhetoric (i.e., appeals to fundamental notions of right and wrong) and how it shapes political competition and voter psychology. We talk about her work analyzing political manifestos, the...

Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao are professors at the University of British Columbia, where they study social psychology and climate behavioral science, respectively. Together, they explore the intersection of human happiness and environmental action, challenging the traditional "guilt and shame" narratives that dominate climate communication. We talk about their new book: Leave the Ligh...

Yamil Velez is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, where he studies what makes political opinions hard to shift. He’s been using innovative new methods to test important ideas about how people arrive at their views and what it takes to change them. We talk about the relationship between beliefs and opinions, why correcting misinformation doesn’t necessarily move opi...

Sylvia Perry is a social psychologist and Associate Professor at Northwestern University, where she directs the Social Cognition and Social Identity Lab. She studies the psychological mechanisms that shape how people recognize and confront their own biases, as well as how those biases are transmitted across generations. We talk about her research on racial socialization , specifically focusing on...

Alex Kustov  studies public opinion about immigration—why it’s so durable, why it becomes so politically explosive, and what (if anything) can make it more popular. We talk about the surprisingly stable foundations of immigration attitudes, why only a small fraction of people are categorically opposed, and how partisanship shapes the debate. Alex also explains what he calls the “altruist’s dilemma...

I'm excited to share a preview of a new podcast I think you’d enjoy: Mind Games. What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or.... secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want? That’s the promise of NLP. Mind Games is an investigation into the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology that has quietly shaped ind...

Steven Rathje is a postdoc at New York University and an incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies the psychology of technology , which includes how people engage with a variety of digital tools, especially those with social implications. We talk about his work on what makes content go viral online and the consequences of AI chatbots that are more agreeable than maybe...

Greg Murphy studies the psychology of concepts. How do we use language to understand things, and how do we sort the world into categories? In our conversation, we consider what makes a category, why we love them, and where they steer us wrong. Dr. Murphy released a book on this topic a few years ago: Categories We Live By How We Classify Everyone and Everything Join me over at Patreon: https://www...

Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel are two social psychologists who study the gears and levers of romantic relationships. What do people find attractive in a partner? How do relationships evolve over time? And critically, do romantic movies get any of this stuff right? Paul and Eli host the podcast, Love Factually , which dissects popular romantic films from the standpoint of behavioral science. What do...

Sara Grady studies the function of entertainment—why we watch, play, and listen to the media that fill our lives. She's an assistant professor of Communication at Ohio State University. In our conversation, we explore what entertainment actually does for us, what it means to connect with fictional characters, and how storytelling shapes our relationships and well-being. Sara also shares her p...

David Broockman is a political scientist at UC Berkeley who digs into one of democracy’s core questions: can political messages really change minds? He’s spent his career running careful studies of persuasion, from door-to-door conversations to the effects of cable news, and testing whether the confident claims of political consultants actually hold up. In our conversation, David shares the path t...

Lulu Miller has done a lot of things and done them very well. She is currently the co-host of Radiolab and its family-friendly spinoff, Terrestrials . She also co-created Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel and wrote the beautiful book, Why Fish Don't Exist . In our conversation, I try to learn Lulu's secrets when it comes it sharing science across media. I've been a fan of her work for a...

Sarah McAnulty is a squid biologist and a science communicator. She's come up with all sorts of creative ways to bring science to the people, especially through local community engagement initiatives. Learn more about Skype a Scientist: https://www.skypeascientist.com/ You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here . Join me over at Patreon: https://www....

Joe Palca reported on science for NPR for years. He found his sweet spot, capturing people's interest and filling them in on curious new findings in just a few minutes. His path to this job wasn't all that direct, and in our conversation, he shares how he got there and what he's learned along the way. Listen to his 2019 story on the "electric dipole moment":  Scientists St...

Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist who gives keynote talks and leads workshops outside academia. She talks frankly about what it takes to book speaking engagements, design powerful talks that make a difference, and juggle a speaking schedule with other commitments. She also just released a book -- Likable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. You can find the rest of this s...

Alex Dainis is a freelance science communicator and video producer. She's been making science videos on YouTube for years, including recent work for the American Chemical Society. In 2024, she was received an Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and the Schmidt Foundation. We talk about how she started down this road...

Joel Bervell recently graduated from medical school, which is when he gained fame as an influencer helping the public navigate good medical science. He’s out there breaking down myths about medicine, particularly shining a light on racial disparities in health and treatment. He recently won a Peabody award, consults with the White House, has given interviews on various media platforms, and has giv...

Kicking off the 3rd season of Hot SciComm Summer is Adam Cole. Adam started at NPR’s Science Desk in 2011 where he started making short videos and radio pieces. In 2014, he launched the YouTube channel Skunk Bear with NPR, which was a venue for fun, quirky, visual forays into science stories big and small. After NPR, he did work for Vox, including their Netflix series, “The Mind, Explained” in 201...

You didn't think #HotSciCommSummer was done, did you? Join me for a whole new season of Hot SciComm summer, a special laid-back podcast series featuring writers, podcast producers, video producers, speakers, and more. Get ready to hear from seven more top-notch science communicators and hear how they got into this area, how they approach their communication, and what you can learn about doing...

Matt Grizzard is a communication scholar who studies how people relate to characters in entertainment media as a sign of how much they enjoy one story versus another. A guiding framework behind this work is " affective disposition theory ." What is that? Well, listen to the episode! We talk about this theory, how it helps us understand people's reactions to what happens to character...

Mohamed Hussein studies how the psychology of persuasion and politics interact. He is an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. On the podcast, we talk about his work on "receptiveness," or people's openness to hearing out opinions they disagree with. (For more on receptiveness, check out episode 56, Receptiveness to Other Opinions with Julia Minson ). But the...

Kurt Gray studies our moral minds and how we grapple with everyday ethics. In his new book, Outraged , he explores the deep psychology of human nature and what it means for how we navigate politically divisive times. In our conversation, we do a deep dive into his perspective that morality is fundamentally about our ideas of harm , which conflicts with how other theories talk about morality. We al...

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist at Columbia Business School. She uses big data to understand people and what motivates them to act. And she has a new book out! It's  Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior ,  and it's an enjoyable, easy-to-read introduction to what your online data say about who you are and how communicators can use...

Angelina Lippert is the Executive Director and Curator at Poster House in New York City. She is an expert when it comes to the use of posters as a tool for mass communication and persuasion. We talk about what a poster is, the history of posters as a medium, the social effects they have, and why we should still care about posters in the digital age. At the top of the show, we hear from  Amos Paul...

Joe Siev studies extreme political behavior and its appeal. He's a postdoctoral fellow at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. In our conversation, we talk about his research linking people's sense of ambivalence with their willingness to take extreme action. Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience Learn more about Opinion Science and catch...