Opinion Science

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#11: Opinions Across Cultures with Sharon Shavitt Jun 21, 2020

Show notes

Dr. Sharon Shavitt is a professor of marketing at the University of Illinois. Her research has looked at consumer behavior from lots of angles, and she has been a pioneer in thinking about the role of culture in the persuasion process. In this episode, we talk about how she started to consider how the success of an advertisement depends on the audience’s cultural values and other effects of culture. She also shares her experience connecting social psychology with the world of marketing, which wasn’t that common when she was in graduate school.

Links for more on some of what we talked about:

Individualistic vs. collectivistic cultures (check out the great book, Clash!)
Dr. Shavitt’s research on culture and persuasion (Han & Shavitt, 1994)
The effect of political values on successful persuasion (Feinberg & Willer, 2016)
"Preferences don't have to be personal" (Riemer, Shavitt, Koo, & Markus, 2014)
Holistic vs. analytic thinking and price-quality judgments (Lalwani & Shavitt, 2013)

For a transcript of this show, visit the episode's webpage.
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Music in this episode by YOUNG BLOOOD (https://www.facebook.com/YOUNGBLOODMUSIK/). Young Blood YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWoMQ7Y7rdXob2MQnIJe_g?sub_confirmation=1

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Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#10: Policing, Race, and Advocacy with Deion Hawkins Jun 14, 2020

Show notes

Deion Hawkins is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Emerson College. He uses in-depth interviews with members of a community to understand health communication and the effects of police brutality. In this episode, he shares his dissertation work about where members of Black community get information about police brutality and the psychological toll that information takes. We also talk more generally about the recent Black Lives Matter protests and the role of race in academic research.

For a transcript of this show, visit the episode's webpage on http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Music in this episode: Stomps Claps & Beatbox by MusicToday80; Composed by: Anwar Amr Youtube Channel; Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0); Music provided by Free Vibes.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#9: Systemic Racism with Phia Salter Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

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 thinking of it as systemic. She talks about her research on the “Marley hypothesis” and the ways in which our environments’ discussion of racial issues shapes our own views.
For more resources on understanding racism in the U.S., you can start by checking out Smithsonian magazine's Resources to Understand Racism in America.

Things we mention in this episode:

Dr. Salter's summary of research related to systemic racism (Salter, Adams, & Perez, 2018)
The "Marley Hypothesis": Historical knowledge associated with recognizing contemporary racism (Nelson, Adams, & Salter, 2013)
Research on preferences for different Black History Month materials (Salter & Adams, 2016)
Writings of Derrick Bell on Critical Race Theory (For an overview of the movement, Dr. Salter recommends Delgado and Stefancic's introductory book)
George Lipsitz's "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness"

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#8: Opinions Online with William Brady Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

William Brady studies how messages spread online--especially on social media sites. By mixing psychology experiments with analyses of millions of messages on social media websites, he's learned what kinds of language cuts through the clutter. Specifically, he finds that moral emotional language plays a hefty role in online communication. In this episode, Billy talks about this research and his other work on moral outrage to give us an idea of how opinions spread online.
Things we mention in this episode:

NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics
Paul Rozin’s research on “the process of moralization”
Statistically analyzing patterns of words (check this out for a quick intro)
Moral emotional language captures attention and prompts retweets (Brady et al., 2017, 2020; also see this Scientific American article)
Moral outrage online (check out Molly Crockett’s article for The Globe and Mail)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#7: Neither Liberal nor Conservative with Nathan Kalmoe May 25, 2020

Show notes

Nathan Kalmoe is a political scientist at Louisiana State University. He studies public opinion and mass political behavior. In 2017 he co-authored the book, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. In this episode, we talk about his research on how political ideology means different things to political leaders than to the general public, how lots of people tend to avoid describing themselves and liberal or conservative, but how they nevertheless seem perfectly comfortable identifying as Democrat or Republican.
Things we mention in this episode:

Early research and writing by Phillip Converse and Walter Lippman
Nathan's recent article in Political Psychology: "Uses and Abuses of Ideology in Political Psychology"
Nathan's book with Donald Kinder: Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public
His upcoming book: With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#6: Film Criticism with Alissa Wilkinson (ft. Cody Duckworth) May 18, 2020

Show notes

Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic and culture reporter for Vox and an associate professor of English and Humanities and The King's College in New York City. We talk about how she translates her own thoughts and feelings about a film into a written piece of criticism and the role that criticism plays in society. She shares thoughts about the job of a film critic and the delicate art of rating, reviewing, and recommending movies.
This episode also features snippets from a conversation with Cody Duckworth. If you're interested, you can hear our full conversation as a bonus episode on the Opinion Science website (here!).
In this episode, we mention a few things Alissa has written about before, so for full context, check out these articles:

"The case for spoilers" (11/7/19)
"Rotten Tomatoes, explained" (7/14/18)
"Do not see The Emoji Movie" (7/29/17)
Alissa's review of "The Assistant" (4/28/20)
Alissa's review of "Bad Education" (4/24/20)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#5: Perceived Bias with Laura Wallace May 11, 2020

Show notes

Laura Wallace studies what happens when people perceive a communicator as biased. In this episode, we talk about why bias is different from trustworthiness, how perceived bias affects a person's ability to be persuasive, and how we think about biased communicators in general.
Things we mention in the episode:

Gallup poll on Americans' perceptions of media bias
NPR's complaints that they have both pro-conservative and pro-liberal biases
Bias and trustworthiness are separate cues to credibility (Wallace, Wegener, & Petty, 2019)
Flip-flopping as a problem for persuasion (Wallace, Wegener, & Petty, 2020)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#4: Climate Change Communication with Matt Goldberg May 04, 2020

Show notes

Matt Goldberg is a soon-to-be associate research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He uses established research from the psychology of persuasion to understand how the public thinks about climate change and how to convince people to adopt new beliefs and behaviors to stave off the threats of global warming. We talk about the differences between theoretical and applied research and what leaders can do to guide the world through this difficult time.
Things we mention in the episode:

Global warming's "Six America's"
Using meta-cognition to understand hurricane evacuation behavior (Goldberg et al., 2020)
Perceived consensus about climate change attitudes (Goldberg et al., 2019a, 2019b)
The effects of discussing climate change with others (Goldberg et al., 2019c)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#3: "Disgusted" with Yoel Inbar Apr 27, 2020

Show notes

Yoel Inbar is a social psychologist at University of Toronto. He studies the feeling of disgust and how it shapes people's moral judgments. We talk about how disgust is associated with certain opinions, and why moral emotions can make people hold onto negative beliefs about genetically modified crops (even when the science supports their safety and usefulness).
Yoel is also co-host of another psychology podcast, Two Psychologists, Four Beers.
Things we mention in the episode:

The relationship between “disgust sensitivity” and political beliefs (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2008)
The “behavioral immune system” (see this article by Schaller)
Disgusting smells and attitudes toward gay men (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2012)
Reasons to be skeptical that disgust amplifies moral judgments (Landy & Goodwin, 2015)
Facial expressions of disgust during moral judgments (Chapman et al., 2009)
Public opinions of genetically modified food (check out Scott, Inbar, et al., 2018)
Evaluating evidence in a way that fits your current opinion (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

#2: Good vs. Bad with Jehan Sparks Apr 20, 2020

Show notes

Jehan Sparks studies how positive vs. negative information informs our opinions. One of the things she looks at is something called a "negativity bias" where negative events loom larger than positive events when we're forming a summary impression. We talk about the nature of good vs. bad, how the order in which we learn information matters, and how different people think about information differently.
Things we mention in the episode:

How “good vs. bad” can be too simple (Sparks, 2020)
The “negativity bias” (Baumeister et al., 2001; Rozin & Royzman, 2001)
How opinions depend on the order in which you learn information (Sparks & Ledgerwood, 2017)
Negativity bias to explain risk-taking (Pietri, Fazio, & Shook, 2013)
The effects of age on the negativity bias (Sparks & Ledgerwood, 2018)

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience

Learn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.

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