Taylor Carlson studies how people navigate political discussions. She does a bunch of interesting work, but I was most interested in talking with her about book she published with Jaime Settle last year. It’s called What Goes Without Saying: Navigating Political Discussion in America. In it, they report their findings from a variety of surveys and experiments and organize them into a four-step model of political discussion. I talked to Taylor about how she got interested in this area, how the bo...
Sep 25, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Morteza Dehghani is a psychologist and computer scientist who uses sophisticated analytics to churn through the words we use when we talk to each other. From that, he and his colleagues can get an idea of people’s moral sensibilities and the consequences of letting morality imbue our opinions on important issues. We talk about his origins in the field and the key insights he's come to about people's moral sense. In the intro, I talk about Toki Pona --the world's smallest language....
Sep 11, 2023•55 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Dan Simons and Chris Chabris are psychological scientists who care about attention and reasoning. They're probably best known for their groundbreaking experiments on "inattentional blindness" where they built a scenario in which people would look straight at someone in a gorilla costume and not even know it. The point is: for as smart as we are, we miss a lot of stuff. And it's not just gorillas. Dan and Chris have a new book out on the psychology behind why people fall prey ...
Aug 28, 2023•52 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Latif Nasser is the current co-host of the WNYC show Radiolab . Radiolab is probably the first podcast I was ever really a fan of. I've been listening since 2007 when it was hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. It's an amazing show that leans on the incredible audio production to convey the wonder of science. The show has branched out to tell all kinds of stories--not just about science--but it's still one of the best science shows out there. Latif came to Radiolab while wor...
Jul 31, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alie Ward is a lot of things--an actor, illustrator, TV host. But I was especially interested in talking to her about her undeniably popular science podcast, Ologies. Her show shares interviews with all sorts of scientists. It's so delightful and engaging, and Alie puts in the work to fill the listener in behind the scenes on things you wouldn't know if you just listened to the interview. Think you're not interested in indigenous bees? Well, just listen to her interview with a Nat...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Siri Carpenter began her science writing journey without a playbook. She was working on a Ph.D. in social psychology and ended up being awarded a AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship where she got critical experience in the field. From there, she took on assignments, pitched stories, and tried to figure out how to do the job of a science journalist. In trying to figure things out, she talked to experienced writers and thought other people would benefit from what they had to say t...
Jul 17, 2023•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sam Jones wears many hats. She's executive producer of the podcast Tiny Matters . She's also worked on other podcast and video projects. She's written about science for The Washington Post, New York Times, Scientific American, and more. She's also the current president of the D.C. Science Writers Association . Oh, and she got her Ph.D. in Biomedical Science at UCSD in 2018. Sam does good work and has to find her own way into science communication as an "alternative"...
Jul 10, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam Mastroianni is a social psychologist and the author of Experimental History , available on Substack. But what is Substack? And is it a good vehicle for science communication? Adam shares his experiences writing for a non-academic audience and also reflects on the role of "science communication" in the world. Should there be a division between the scientists and the science communicators? What is a scientist's responsibility in keeping in touch with the public? We also discuss...
Jul 03, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Melinda Wenner Moyer is a science journalist and contributing editor at Scientific American magazine. Recently, Melinda received the Excellence in Science Journalism award from The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2019 Bricker Award for Science Writing in Medicine, and her work was featured in the 2020 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. But that’s only recently. She’s been writing about science for major outlets for years and doing it really, really well. In 20...
Jun 26, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast (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 scien...
Jun 19, 2023•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 contain...
Jun 05, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 televis...
May 22, 2023•57 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 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 episode Dolf Zillmann's disposition theory (Zillmann & Cantor, 1972 ; 1996 ; also see affective disposition theory [Wiki] ) The d...
May 08, 2023•54 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Apr 24, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 10, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast 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 thi...
Mar 27, 2023•50 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 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 whe...
Mar 13, 2023•53 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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: Epis...
Feb 27, 2023•52 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 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 minorit...
Feb 13, 2023•54 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Sander van der Linden studies the psychology of misinformation. He and his lab have conducted studies to understand why people believe false information, and they've also leveraged the psychology of "inoculation" to build tools that help people avoid falling prey to misinformation. He describes this work and more in his new book, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity . You can play the video game that Sander's lab built to inoculate people ...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast April Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire, and she studies the psychology of androcentrism—people’s tendency to think of men as a stand-in for all people and treating women’s experiences as the outlier. We talk about exactly what androcentrism is, the kinds of evidence we have for it, and what it means for the future of how we think about gender. Things that come up in this episode: The history of the genderless pronoun "thon," including a ...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Another year in the books! I don't think I ever really mastered writing the year as "2022," and now I have to write "2023." I'll figure it out one of these days. But another year meant another year of Opinion Science ! This year saw even more new listeners, amazing guests, and an ambitious series of episodes over the summer. Your support has meant a lot. So even though I'm (again) a week or so behind on this, I wanted put together another "best of" ep...
Jan 09, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Geoff Durso studies what happens when we face mixed information. When people do good things and bad things. When a product has positive and negative qualities. Geoff's an assistant professor of marketing at DePaul University. He's also an old friend of mine. We met up at a conference and caught up, chatting about some of the cool work Geoff has done on the nature of ambivalence. (As I mention in the intro, you can also check out Episode 35 with Iris Schneider for more on ambivalence.) ...
Jan 02, 2023•52 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 committee for the Science of Magic Association and played a central role in the book Sleights of Mind: Wha...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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, exactly. I was excited to sit down with Tenelle and get her take on intellectual humility, what it does f...
Dec 05, 2022•57 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 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 say or do something biased. In our conversation, Margo gives a big overview of her work in these areas...
Nov 21, 2022•50 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 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 characteristics of the language your speak can shape your political opinions. Languages around the world differ ...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 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 in this episode she draws a contrast between thinking of racism as an individual bias versus thinkin...
Oct 24, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 edited the Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology and authored Language as Social Action: So...
Oct 10, 2022•54 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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 democracy over other political attitudes. Some things that come up in the episode: How moral values can be u...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
