Opinion Science

Tony Barnhart is Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College. But just as notably, he's a magician. As a result of this dual identity, he has the unique distinction of being an expert in the psychology of magic. Magicians have long prided themselves on understanding and exploiting human psychology, but Tony actually brings a scientific perspective. He's on the commit...

Tenelle Porter is a new colleague of mine at Ball State University. She's an educational psychologist, and one of the things she studies is intellectual humility , which is people's awareness of the limits of their knowledge and the fallibility of their reasoning. Intellectual humility offers a variety of handy benefits even though there has been some disagreement about what it is, exact...

Margo Monteith is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. She studies how we can reduce prejudice in the world by confronting those biases head-on. One way we can confront prejudice is to keep ourselves in check, paying attention to the ways in which we might say or do something biased. Another way we can confront prejudice is to call out other people when they sa...

Efrén Pérez is a professor is a professor of Political Science and Psychology at UCLA. He studies political attitudes and behaviors among various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. With Margit Tavits , he recently co-wrote the book Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion . The book is a fascinating summary of research they have conducted testing how the unique characterist...

This week, I'm out with COVID, so I'm re-sharing an early Opinion Science episode that has remained one of the most downloaded episodes of the show. I also took the opportunity to very slightly remaster it. See you in a couple weeks with a new episode! Phia Salter takes a cultural psychology approach to studying racism. She’s an associate professor of Psychology at Davidson College, and...

Tom Holtgraves studies how language helps us do things. We use words to inquire, to instruct, to command, and to persuade. Words are social. He's currently a Professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University (just down the hall from me!), and his lab studies how people use language and other symbols (e.g., emoji) to successfully or unsuccessfully communicate with one another. He edi...

Robb Willer studies social and political divides, and maybe more importantly, he tries to find ways to overcome them. In our conversation, he shares his personal background, unpacks persuasion strategies that cut across political lines, and reveals the results of a major new study in his lab that tested a bunch of strategies for reducing political animosity and encouraging people to value democrac...

John Sides is a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and co-founded The Monkey Cage , which is a popular political science blog now available at the Washington Post. The blog gives academic social scientists a platform to use their expertise to help the public understand political news. In our conversation, John talks about the origins of TMC, the kinds of articles that are successful, and...

Steve Rathje has managed to rack up more than a million followers on TikTok ( @stevepsychology ) while pursuing a PhD in social psychology (and doing some very cool research ). He shares quick videos about key insights from psychological science that are reaching an entirely new audience. In our conversation, he fills me in on the finer points of TikTok as a platform, why it's uniquely suited...

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...

Tim Houlihan and Kurt Nelson are the hosts of Behavioral Grooves , which is a wonderful weekly podcast featuring interviews with behavioral scientists and practitioners. For #HotSciCommSummer, I wanted to learn more about how they started their podcast journey, what advice they have for budding podcasters, and what advice they have for academics who are going to be interviewed about their work. Th...

Jesse Thorn hosts the show "Bullseye" on NPR where he interviews people in arts and culture. A few years ago, he interviewed a bunch of incredible interviewers for his podcast, " The Turnaround ." He's just the guy to talk to about the craft of interviewing people of note, which is a skill that's called for in lots of science communication efforts. So I was excited to...

Vanessa Bohns is a social psychologist at Cornell University, and last year she release a book for the public: You Have More Influence Than You Think . It's a great book about a program of research she's been working on for year. I wanted to talk to Vanessa about what it was like to translate her research into a format that would be useful and digestible for non-academic audiences. We al...

Daniel Pink is a bestselling author who uses social science research to explore big questions about what it means to be human. He’s written seven books , and his newest one came out last February— The Power of Regret . You can also check out his Masterclass on sales and persuasion. In our conversation, Dan gives a look into his writing process. How does he go from an idea for a book to the final p...

Evelyn Carter is a social psychologist who specializes in communicating science-based practices in diversity, equity, and inclusion to organizations. She leads workshops, gives talks, develops courses, gives interviews with the media, and writes newsletters…all of which requires a special skill for making science understandable and actionable . She’s currently the president at Paradigm , which is...

Taylor Scott is an assistant research professor at Penn State, she's the director of research translation in the Evidence-to-Impact Collaborative , and she's co-director of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration . In this episode, we talk about the relationship between scientists and policymakers, how to facilitate those interactions, and ultimately what social science research might have...

David Nussbaum is a social psychologist with a keen talent for pitching Op-Eds. He's worked with many social scientists to land articles in major outlets, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, etc. He recently launched a new non-profit organization,  Psychgeist Media , which aims to help researchers share their work with the public in an accurate and engaging way. ...

David McRaney is a writer and podcaster who has been covering important work in psychology for many years. Although he was a guest on Opinion Science a few months ago ( Episode 58: How Minds Change with David McRaney ), I also used the opportunity to ask him about his process for communicating psychological research to the public. So, the first 15 minutes of this episode is a repeat of his earlier...

Meryl Horn is a producer at Science Vs from Gimlet Media and Spotify.  Science Vs is a popular science podcast that pits timely claims against scientific evidence. It's a great show. You should listen to it. Before being a podcast producer, Meryl got her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California San Francisco. She shares how she went from being a graduate student to working profes...

Joss Fong is a senior editorial producer at Vox . She produces science videos on a variety of topics, pushing the medium in ever more creative directions to convey interesting and important ideas. We spend a lot of our time talking about her most recent video: "How American conservatives turned against the vaccine" Here are some of the other videos we talked about in this episode: "...

Special summer series on science communication! Regular Opinion Science episodes will resume in September. Announcing a special podcast mini-series for the summer focused on social 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. I also wanted to emphasize the unique challenge of soc...

G. Elliott Morris is a data journalist for The Economist. In July 2022, he’s releasing his first book, Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them . The book takes a critical look at the history and current use of public opinion polling and the role it plays in democracy. Morris also contributed to The Economist’s 2020 presidential election forecasts . We talk about how he got involve...

Robin Nabi is a professor of communication at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She studies how emotional appeals can (and cannot) lead people to change their thoughts and behaviors. She’s published important research on the effects of anger, humor, and guilt, and she’s also developed integrated theories about how emotions can work together in the persuasion process. We talk about all th...

Linda Skitka is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She's been studying people's moral convictions --the opinions that we connect to our core sense of moral right and wrong. Two people might agree about universal healthcare, for example, but they might disagree about how much their positions on this issue are drawn from their personal moral c...

Adam Hahn spends a lot of time thinking about how well people know their own biases. Sure, people often refer to "implicit bias" as social biases that exist unconsciously . But do they really? How strongly can we claim we're unaware of these attitudes and is there any reason to think people can readily tell you what their gut reactions are when they encounter people of different rac...