Opinion Science

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 pairs well with this one!

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

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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 walks us through an actual example of deep canvassing that made a real difference to someone’s attitudes toward transgender people.

If you want to know more, check out Dave’s Substack, where he’s written a lot of great articles about his team’s approach to persuasion.

Also, doing my due diligence, I’ll link to the movie I mentioned in the intro--“Salesman” (1969)--if you want to dive into classic American cinéma verité.

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

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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 people with diverse viewpoints (Hussein & Wheeler, 2024). 

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

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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 in 19th-century America (Finnegan, 2016; 2021)
• The use of science in advertising consumer products (Philipp-Muller et al., 2023)
• Why people are anti-science and what we can do about it (Philipp-Muller et al., 2022)
• Aviva’s YouTube Channel
• The “Nights with Science” ad from 1863: https://www.ohiohistory.org/science-lectures/

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

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

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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 of behavioral science in public policy, so I wanted to share our full conversation as a standalone episode.

Several years ago, David wrote a great book about the Behavioral Insights Team and what it's learned about applying behavioral science at scale. That book is: Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference (and I really enjoyed it).

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

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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, "They Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics."

I had already been considering releasing the full interview as a standalone episode of Opinion Science, and under the circumstances, it felt like sharing it now was a nice tribute to the man who had contributed so much. I hope listening to this is a comforting and warm reminder of his impact on behavioral science.

This isn't a typical Opinion Science episode, though, because the interview was mostly for research and pulling soundbites. We didn't set out for it to be a polished standalone interview. As a result, we go down rabbit holes, get technical, assume shared knowledge, etc. So, I make no promises that you'll follow every moment of the interview if you're not already familiar with Kahneman's work, but it might still be a fun listen anyway.

Thanks again to Danny Kahneman for reminiscing about the early days of his career with us.

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

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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 to dissect how often people on these platforms are exposed to political opinions, particularly from people whose opinions differ from their own. They were also able to conduct experiments on these platforms. By turning some of the knobs and levers, could they influence people’s engagement on these platforms and even change their political views?

The four big research papers that all came out together are:

• Guess et al. (2023, Science): How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?
• Guess et al. (2023, Science): Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions
• Gonzalez-Bailon et al. (2023, Science): Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook
• Nyhan et al. (2023, Nature): Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing

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

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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 economics is mainstream, but Sendhil has continued to study big questions that cut across the typical academic boundaries between disciplines. We talk about AI, economics, and racial bias.

You can listen to our full series on behavioral economics here (Sendhil’s voice pops up in episodes 3 and 4).

Also, the study we discuss testing racial discrimination in hiring practices was first reported in this 2003 paper in American Economic Review.

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

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

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 Thought We Were Ridiculous: The Unlikely Story of Behavioral Economics."

*Correction:  During Rahul Bhui's section of the episode, we mistakenly said that people "don't take as many risks when they're framed as potential losses…even though they're relatively happy to take risks when they're framed as potential gains." We accidentally got this flipped! In truth, research on prospect theory shows that people tend to be risk-seeking in the loss domain but risk-averse in the gain domain. 

For more information, check out the Opinion Science webpage for this series: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/they-thought-we-were-ridiculous/

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

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