Opinion Science

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 those insights to serve up compelling ...

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 Kennedy, Jr. He's a le...

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.

For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/

Learn more about Opin...

*If you downloaded this episode early, the wrong file was uploaded. Sorry! We're all good now.

Colin Wayne Leach is a social psychologist who also wears a bunch of other social science hats. He approaches the social world by appreciating its nature as a system of interconnected parts. He's made strides in a lot of research areas, including emotion, prejudice, and morality.

In our conversation, we focus o...

Dr. Richard Petty is a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. He's probably best known for co-developing the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion (but he's done a lot of other stuff, too). He was also my advisor in grad school.

In the last episode of Opinion Science, Rich lent his voice to telling the story of the ELM. Go check that out if you haven't already. But my full conversation ...

In the 1980s, two social psychologists--Rich Petty and John Cacioppo--devised a new way to make sense of persuasion: the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Their work came on the heels of an era in psychology when people were fed up with persuasion research. The old studies were a mess, and it wasn't clear if it was even possible to understand how persuasion works. In the course of studying for an exam in graduate school, Rich and ...

Drs. Sarah Gaither and Analia Albuja study racial identity and how we can overcome racial biases. They just published an important new study on the effects of random roommate assignments on students’ ability to develop diverse social networks.

Our conversation focuses on two key research papers: Gaither & Sommers (2013); Albuja et al. (in press).

And if you haven’t listened to my episode on the Contact Hypothesis (Episode 44), it...

Dave Fleischer is a political organizer who led the team that pioneered “deep canvassing,” which is a particularly effective form of face-to-face persuasion. It was developed on the ground, but when political scientists put it to a rigorous test, they found that these brief conversations with voters were having a lasting impact (Broockman & Kalla, 2016).

On this episode, Dave shares his background in political campaigns and walk...

Christian Wheeler studies the intersection of opinions, communication, and personal identity. He’s a professor of management and marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In our conversation, we talk about the quirks of teaching in a business school, the promise of improv exercises for learning life skills, and his new research on the reputational benefits (or not) of being good at self-control and willing to listen to...

Aviva Philipp-Muller studies why people might pass on science. She’s an Assistant Professor of marketing at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University. We talked about her research on people’s openness to science in consumer products and how they’re marketed. She also shared her perspective on how anti-science views are an issue of persuasion.

Things that come up in this episode:

• The public science lecture circuit i...

Aaron Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Louisville College of Business. He studies how persuasion, branding, and consumer–brand relationships differ between cultures. In our conversation, we talk about Aaron's story and some of his research on how the influence of calling a product "top-rated" versus "best-selling" depends on culture (Barnes & Shavitt, 2024). 

For a trans...

David Halpern is the President & Founding Director of the Behavioral Insights Team. It started as a "nudge unit" in the British government but has gone on to become its own company with offices around the world. We talked to David in 2021 when we were gathering interviews for our podcast series, They Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics. But he had a lot of great insight on the role o...

Daniel Kahneman was a titan in social science. He transformed our understanding of decision-making, he taught a generation about social psychology, he won a Nobel prize. It's hard to overstate his influence. He passed away last week, and the field is mourning the loss. Along with the hosts of the podcast Behavioral Grooves, I interviewed Kahneman back in 2021, and we used that interview as a foundation of our podcast series, &...

Andy Guess studies how social media platforms shape people’s political views. He’s an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. Last summer, he was part of a big team that released four papers on their analyses and experiments in social media all at the same time. The research was in collaboration with Meta, the company responsible for Facebook and Instagram. 

Andy and the team were able t...

Sendhil Mullainathan does a lot of things, and he does them well. He’s a professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. I originally talked to Sendhil for our podcast series, They Thought We Were Ridiculous. He was well-positioned to give his perspective on a contentious, interdisciplinary field of social science called “behavioral economics.” But nowadays, behavioral econom...

To look into the future of Behavioral Economics, we talked to three young researchers who are pushing the field further. A new generation of researchers is striving to understand decision-making in the developing world, how brains process economic decisions, and how bigger, more transparent scientific methods can shed light on basic principles of choice. 

This is the fifth episode of a special series called: "They Tho...

Eventually, Behavioral Economics emerged as an influential perspective. It’s become mainstream in Economics, and it’s helped inform programs and policies that affect real people every day. 

This is the fourth episode of a special series called: "They Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics."

For more information, check out the Opinion Science webpage for this series: http:/...

Behavioral Economics was using psychology to understand economics, but what did economists and psychologists think about their unexpected marriage? Slowly, this fledgling field weathered a flurry of criticism from both sides as it doggedly held onto data-driven ideas about economic decision-making. 

This is the third episode of a special series called: "They Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral...

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were two psychologists with big ideas about how people made decisions. Their careful research launched a brand new way of understanding people’s choices, and it helped fan the flames of Behavioral Economics.

This is the second episode of a special series called: "They Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics."

For more information, check out ...