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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*If you downloaded this episode early, the wrong file was uploaded. Sorry! We're all good now.

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 on his work on protest as a vehicle for social change. He shares how he thinks about protest and the system it's embedded in, and walks us through what protest is and how we can understand it better.

If you're interested to learn more, you can read a great recent summary of Colin's perspective in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (Leach et al., 2024)

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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 with Rich was also great and went in a few directions that just didn't fit into a general intro to the ELM. So, I present that full interview here. It gets a little inside baseball at some points, so be aware of that. But it's an interesting glimpse at the random ride that a career in science can be and the number of lucky moments that can steer the wheel.

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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 John started sketching out some ways to make sense of things. Over the next decade or so, those ideas blossomed into a fully formed theory that continues to inspire persuasion research today.

In this episode, I bring you up to speed on the Elaboration Likelihood Models and the incredible stories of happenstance that made it all happen. The foundation of the episode includes an interview with Rich Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University. In the latter half of the episode, we hear from Pablo Briñol, psychology professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Plus, there are some bonus words from Bob Cialdini.

If you want to dive really deep into the Elaboration Likelihood Model, check out the 1986 chapter in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). For the updated aspect of the model--"self-validation"--you can check out a recent paper by Pablo and Rich (Briñol & Petty, 2022).

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

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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/

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