Opinion Science

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 science journalist.

In trying to figure things out, she talked to experienced writers and thought other people would benefit from what they had to say too. And thus The Open Notebook (TON) was born. It's been a powerful resource for science writers, providing free access to articles and interviews about the craft. The website also includes courses and a "pitch database." In 2020, Siri's edited book "The Craft of Science Writing" was released, featuring new and established articles from TON. 

In our conversation, she shares her journey and offers advice for aspiring science journalists.

You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.

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

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 Science at UCSD in 2018. Sam does good work and has to find her own way into science communication as an "alternative" to the more typical academic pathways laid out in grad school. In our conversation, we talk about her journey and what she's learned about doing scicomm her way. 

You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.

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/.

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 the scientists and the science communicators? What is a scientist's responsibility in keeping in touch with the public?

We also discuss his new article in The Atlantic: "I Ruined Two Birthday Parties and Learned the Limits of Psychology."

You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.

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/.

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 Nature Writing anthology. But that’s only recently. She’s been writing about science for major outlets for years and doing it really, really well. 

In 2021, she released her first book—How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes, which is a great parenting book that actually cares about evidence from behavioral science.

We talk about how she got started and her new book, but we also do a deep dive on a 2017 feature article she wrote for Scientific American about whether legal access to guns actually deters crime and makes people safer ("More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows"). It’s a really great example of what science journalism can be, and I wanted to know every step of how something like that gets written.

You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.

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/.

(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 forms of media.

So whether you’re an academic who wants to communicate your research more widely, a journalist interested in covering more social science topics, or just someone in the world who’s looking to be a better communicator, I think you’ll find a ton to like this series.

Just stay subscribed to Opinion Science to get this summer series. All episodes in the series will also be available online at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/hot-scicomm-summer/

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/.

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 became a tool of political left and outrage media because a tool of the political right.

Update: This episode was replayed on June 5th, 2023 and contains an extra interview at the end about some newer work. Danna's TED talk came out in 2020. She just released a full lecture series on Propaganda and Persuasion through The Great Courses. And later this year, you can read her new book Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation (out October 17, 2023).

Some things that come up on this episode:

• Daily Show viewers were particularly well-informed about the 2004 election (Young, 2004)
• Jon Stewart defending the Daily Show on Crossfire (2006)
• Jokes lead people to suspend critical thinking about a message (Polk, Young, & Holbert, 2009; Young, 2008)

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

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 can take away.

Things that come up in this episode:

• In the intro, I mention that social scientists are no strangers to analyzing decisions in televised game shows. These include analyses of  bets placed on the show Jeopardy! (Metrick, 1995), choices on Deal or No Deal (Post et al., 2008), and bids on The Price is Right (e.g., Berk et al., 1996)
• Erin's new paper analyses trends over 40 seasons of Survivor (Kunz et al,. in press)

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

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 mention in this episode

• Dolf Zillmann's disposition theory (Zillmann & Cantor, 1972; 1996; also see affective disposition theory [Wiki])
• The difference between "reward associations" and "trait impressions" in how we learn about other people (Hackel et al., 2020; 2022), including differences in brain processes (Hackel et al., 2015)
• People will give more to someone who gave them more, even if that person is just as "generous" a person as someone who gave less (Hackel et al., 2018)
• We can form impressions of others is various sorts of "gist" memories (Hackel et al., in press)

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

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

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)

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/.