Opinion Science

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.

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

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.

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

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/.

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/.

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/.

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/.

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/.

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/.

This week I talk to Jake Teeny about his research on word of mouth. When do people pass their opinions along to others? Jake tells me that businesses count word of mouth as a leading form of marketing, but it can be tricky to know exactly how to control it. We talk about when and why people share their opinions, according to the research in social psychology.

(By the way, Jake and I co-author a blog for Psychology Today called "A Difference of Opinion.")

Things we mention in the episode:

• Arousal increases social transmission of information (Berger, 2011)
• Certainty as a reason to persuade (Cheatham & Tormala, 2015)
• Hypocrisy as a form of cognitive dissonance (Stone & Fernandez, 2008)
• Atypical things are more popular (Berger & Packard, 2018)
• Hit Makers by Derek Thompson (Amazon)

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/.

Coming Soon: The Opinion Science Podcast

Visit opinionsciencepodcast.com for more.

I’m Andy Luttrell, and I’m excited to introduce the Opinion Science Podcast. It’s a show about the science of people’s opinions, where they come from, and how they change. I’m a social psychologist, and I’ll be talking to other social scientists who study public opinion and persuasion, but I’ll also talk to other experts in the business of understanding and shaping the world’s views. The ideas we’ll explore in this show will give you a glimpse into the psychology of political attitudes, consumer preferences, public health communication, and social activism, just to name a few. But I’m even interested in more mundane opinions…like why some people inexplicably prefer cake over pie. So subscribe now and tune in every other week for these conversations. I think you’ll like it…but form your own opinion.

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/.