Opinion Science

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 Studying EDM To Find Why Everything In ...

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 summer's science communication p...

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 and decided to make it her full-time...

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 given talks all over.  He hosts the po...

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 2019.

Most recently, Adam’s work came o...

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 it yourself.

The new season is still...

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 characters in media, and what it means for the...

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 research we talk about includes stu...

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 also get into what it means for concept...

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/

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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...