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). A…

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, …

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 …

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 pe…

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" …

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 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 b…

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 co…

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 f…

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 c…

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…

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 call…

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 o…

For years, neoclassical economists have made an unusual assumption—that people are rational decision-makers. But a few social scientists have dared to challenge that assumption. They’ve collected observations, analyzed data, and presented their perspective. Their work would usher in a new era of Economics. This is the first episode of a special ser…

Coming February 26th! I team up with the guys at Behavioral Groovesto produce a 5-part podcast series on behavioral economics. We tell the story of how some young social scientists took issue with assumptions that economists were making about how people make decisions, and they ended up transforming the field. Their insights went on to shape govern…

Jack Dovidio's work is at the heart of how we currently understand the psychology of prejudice. He's spent his career considering where prejudice comes from, how people express it, how it biases people's judgments and behaviors, and what we could do to address it. He's an emeritus professor at Yale University, and he's also just a really pleasant g…

Jim McNulty is a professor of psychology at Florida State University. He studies close relationships, and in this episode, we talk about his research on "automatic partner attitudes." When someone sees their romantic partner, their feelings about that person spring automatically to mind. And sometimes those feelings conflict with what they openly S…

Happy New Year! For the first time in the show's history, this episode's a day late. Sorry, dear listeners. So it's 2024, and what better way to kick off the new year than to dive into some nostalgia for 2023 already? As has become tradition around here, I compiled some clips of favorite moments on the podcast from the last year. As I say every yea…

Elizabeth Dunn studies the psychology of happiness. One of her major research areas has looked at generosity's effects on well-being. We're happier when we spend money on other people. But studying happiness has its challenges, especially if we want to build strategies that help people feel happier. So, she shared a snapshot of her research on happ…

Mikaela Spruill studies juries and the legal system’s role in sustaining social inequalities. She’s a postdoctoral fellow in criminal justice with SPARQ at Stanford University. In our conversation, Mikaela shares the benefits and drawbacks of juries in the courtroom, how scientists study jury decision-making, and how jurors apply very specific lega…

James Druckman studies how political messages can shape people's opinions. He is maybe best known for his work on framing issues as a strategic communication strategy. He also has a recent paper on "a framework for the study of persuasion," which organizes the many variables that matter for persuasion. For a transcript of this episode, visit this e…

Mónica Guzmán wants us to have better conversation with the people we disagree with. She's the Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, and in 2022, she released her book, "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times." This year, she launched a brand new podcast called "A Brav…

Lindsay Hahn studies how entertainment media convey moral messages, especially among children. She's an assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo, where she leads the Media Psychology and Morality Lab. We talk about her background, how her team surveys media for the moral lessons they communicate, and how her new work is tur…

Russ Fazio has spent his career getting to the bottom of how opinions work. From his first study as a college student in 1974 to a leading expert in basically everything, his work has had a deep impact on the field of social psychology (and communication and political science...) His research over the years has included game-changing work on cognit…

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 …

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 fi…

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…

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 …

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 kn…

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 scienc…

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 …

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 t…

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 Na…

(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 f…

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 bec…

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…

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 ment…

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 t…

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 signal…

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 …

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, fo…

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 langu…

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 wil…

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 Mis…

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 …

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…

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 don…

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 sc…

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 so…

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 …