Opinion Science

Latest Episodes:

Political Persuasion with Alex Coppock (Rebroadcast) Apr 24, 2023

Show notes

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 with Alex Coppock
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Alex Coppock is an assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research considers what affects people's political beliefs, especially the kinds of messages people regularly encounter--TV ads, lawn signs, Op-Eds, etc. In this episode, he shares the findings of a big, new study that just came out as well as what it means for how persuasion works.

Things that came up in this episode:

A new study testing dozens the efficacy of dozens of political ads (Coppock, Hill, & Vavreck, 2020)
The long-lasting effects of newspaper op-eds on public opinion (Coppock, Ekins, & Kirby, 2018)
The effects of lawn signs on vote outcomes (Green, Krasno, Coppock, Farrer, Lenoir, & Zingher, 2016)
Framing effects in persuasion (for an overview, see Chong & Druckman, 2007)
The sleeper effect (see here for an overview)

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#77: Opinions in the Brain with Uma Karmarkar Apr 10, 2023

Show notes

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 the promises and limitations of neuroscience and cover a whole lot of ground in doing so!

Things that come up in this episode:

The opening example of a neural focus group to identify songs that would become hits is from Berns and Moore's (2012) experiment published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. The other examples were also published studies, including the study on anti-smoking PSAs (Falk et al., 2012) and chocolate brand displays (Kühn et al., 2016).
(By the way, I didn't actually just stumbled across those songs in the intro. As with most of the music in the podcast, they came from Epidemic Sound.)
Uma has two great summary articles on the role of neuroscience in consumer psychology (Karmarkar & Plassmann, 2019; Karmarkar & Yoon, 2016)
And because it came up, I'll plug my one fMRI study on certainty and ambivalence in the brain (Luttrell et al., 2016)

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#76: You Can't Tell Me What To Do with Ben Rosenberg Mar 27, 2023

Show notes

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 this episode:

2022 set new records for attempts to ban books in the United States (Associated Press, 2023)
In the intro, I tell a personal story about book bans in my school district, but don't worry--I have sources (1, 2, 3)
Banning books has been linked to increases in sales (e.g., The Hill, 2022)
Psychology research has found that censorship can change people's attitudes (e.g., Worchel & Arnold, 1973)
Ben and his advisor summarized a long history of research on psychological reactance (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018)

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#75: High-Quality Listening with Guy Itzchakov Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

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 where we really stand, realizing that the world is more nuanced than our simple opinions make them out to be. In our conversation, Guy shares the hallmarks of quality listening and what impact they have on speakers.

Things that come up in this episode:

Psychologist Carl Rogers and his pioneering work on person-centric therapy and empathic listening. Sources for the intro included: Boettcher, Hofmann, and Wu (Noba Textbook); Owen (2022); Rogers and Roethlisberger (1952)
The markers of good listening: attention, comprehension, and positive intention (see Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022)
Being listened to can lead people to openly acknowledge their ambivalence (Itzchakov et al., 2017) while becoming more clear in their views (Itzchakov et al., 2018).
Speakers who experienced high-quality listening became less prejudiced in their views of other groups (Itzchakov et al., 2020)

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#74: When a Society Changes its Mind with Tessa Charlesworth Feb 27, 2023

Show notes

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: Episode 16: Implicit Bias with Mahzarin Banaji

Things that come up in this episode:

Tessa has a series of papers on the changes in implicit biases over time (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2022)
Decoding gender stereotypes though language analysis (Charlesworth et al., 2021)
Tracking stereotypes revealed by the words in books over centuries (Charlesworth et al., 2022)

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

#73: Navigating Diversity with Maureen Craig Feb 13, 2023

Show notes

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 minority group stand up for another minority group?
Things that come up in this episode:

People often implicitly associate “American” with “White” (see Devos & Mohamed, 2014)
According to the U.S. Census, less than half of Americans under 18 are White (AP News, 2021) and less than half of White Americans live in predominantly White neighborhoods (Washington Post, 2022)
For a summary of the work on people’s reactions to increasing racial diversity, see Craig et al. (2018)
For a summary of the work on solidarity and allyship, check out Craig et al. (2020)
People assume that certain racial groups are aligned on specific social and political issues (Craig et al., 2022)
Framing inequality in terms of the disadvantaged group prompts more support for action than framing it in terms of the advantaged group (Dietze & Craig, 2021)

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#72: Fighting Against Misinformation with Sander van der Linden Jan 30, 2023

Show notes

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 against misinformation. The game is called Bad News.

At the beginning of the episode, I share the story of the first bit of fake news in American media. In tracing the arc of the story and getting the critical details, I turned primarily to Andie Tucher's recent book, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History. Other details thanks to an interview Tucher did, a story in The Saturday Evening Post, and an article by Emmanuel Paraschos.

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#71: "Person" = "Man"? with April Bailey Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

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 question in The Straight Dope (see Baron, 2018; Converse, 1884; Merriam-Webster)
An overview of the psychology of androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2019)
Androcentrism reflected in the order in which people are listed (Hegarty et al., 2011)
Billions of words on the internet highlight everyday androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2022)

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BONUS: "Best" of Opinion Science (2022) Jan 09, 2023

Show notes

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" episode, featuring notable moments from the podcast in 2022. As I say every year, it’s not truly a “best of” per se because I really am attached to every episode. Instead, I’ve chosen some clips that highlight the kind of show this is, including some of the things that made this year especially special.

If you’re new to the show, this is a great place to start! And if you’ve been listening since the beginning, join me on some fun memories from this year.

-Andy

Featured 2022 episodes:

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#70: A "Mixed" Bag with Geoff Durso Jan 02, 2023

Show notes

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.)

Things that come up in this episode:

Geoff's early work on ambivalence (Rydell & Durso, 2012)
The effects of expecting ambivalence (Durso et al., 2021)
How psychological power makes us delay making decisions when we're ambivalent (Durso et al., 2016)

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

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