Opinion Science

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 down what reactance is, where it comes from, who it applies to, and what questions about it are still unanswered.

Things that come up in this episode:

• 2022 set new records for attempts to ban books in the United States (Associated Press, 2023)
• In the intro, I tell a personal story about book bans in my school district, but don't worry--I have sources (1, 2, 3)
• Banning books has been linked to increases in sales (e.g., The Hill, 2022)
• Psychology research has found that censorship can change people's attitudes (e.g., Worchel & Arnold, 1973)
• Ben and his advisor summarized a long history of research on psychological reactance (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018)

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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, for example, that when someone really, deeply listens to what we have to say, it provides us with a safe opportunity to explore where we really stand, realizing that the world is more nuanced than our simple opinions make them out to be. In our conversation, Guy shares the hallmarks of quality listening and what impact they have on speakers.

Things that come up in this episode:

• Psychologist Carl Rogers and his pioneering work on person-centric therapy and empathic listening. Sources for the intro included: Boettcher, Hofmann, and Wu (Noba Textbook); Owen (2022); Rogers and Roethlisberger (1952)
• The markers of good listening: attention, comprehension, and positive intention (see Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022)
• Being listened to can lead people to openly acknowledge their ambivalence (Itzchakov et al., 2017) while becoming more clear in their views (Itzchakov et al., 2018).
• Speakers who experienced high-quality listening became less prejudiced in their views of other groups (Itzchakov et al., 2020)

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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 language over a couple of centuries to track changes in common stereotypes.

Also, we mention a previous episode of the show that’s worth checking out: Episode 16: Implicit Bias with Mahzarin Banaji

Things that come up in this episode:

• Tessa has a series of papers on the changes in implicit biases over time (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2022)
• Decoding gender stereotypes though language analysis (Charlesworth et al., 2021)
• Tracking stereotypes revealed by the words in books over centuries (Charlesworth et al., 2022)

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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 will be White? She also shares her other work on who tends to advocate for whom. What makes an "ally"? When do members of one minority group stand up for another minority group? 

Things that come up in this episode:

• People often implicitly associate “American” with “White” (see Devos & Mohamed, 2014)
• According to the U.S. Census, less than half of Americans under 18 are White (AP News, 2021) and less than half of White Americans live in predominantly White neighborhoods (Washington Post, 2022)
• For a summary of the work on people’s reactions to increasing racial diversity, see Craig et al. (2018)
• For a summary of the work on solidarity and allyship, check out Craig et al. (2020)
• People assume that certain racial groups are aligned on specific social and political issues (Craig et al., 2022)
• Framing inequality in terms of the disadvantaged group prompts more support for action than framing it in terms of the advantaged group (Dietze & Craig, 2021)

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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 Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity.

You can play the video game that Sander's lab built to inoculate people against misinformation. The game is called Bad News.

At the beginning of the episode, I share the story of the first bit of fake news in American media. In tracing the arc of the story and getting the critical details, I turned primarily to Andie Tucher's recent book, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History. Other details thanks to an interview Tucher did, a story in The Saturday Evening Post, and an article by Emmanuel Paraschos.

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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 for the future of how we think about gender.

Things that come up in this episode:

• The history of the genderless pronoun "thon," including a question in The Straight Dope (see Baron, 2018; Converse, 1884; Merriam-Webster)
• An overview of the psychology of androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2019)
• Androcentrism reflected in the order in which people are listed (Hegarty et al., 2011)
• Billions of words on the internet highlight everyday androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2022)

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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 lot.

So even though I'm (again) a week or so behind on this, I wanted put together another "best of" episode, featuring notable moments from the podcast in 2022. As I say every year, it’s not truly a “best of” per se because I really am attached to every episode. Instead, I’ve chosen some clips that highlight the kind of show this is, including some of the things that made this year especially special.

If you’re new to the show, this is a great place to start! And if you’ve been listening since the beginning, join me on some fun memories from this year.

-Andy

Featured 2022 episodes:

• Episode 54: Influence is Your Superpower with Zoe Chance
• Episode 57: Media, Norms, & Social Change with Sohad Murrar
• Episode 58: How Minds Change with David McRaney (ft. Adam Mastroianni)
• Episode 63: Why We Need Polls with G. Elliott Morris
• Episode 64: Saving Democracy with Robb Willer
• Episode 68: Intellectual Humility with Tenelle Porter
• SciComm Summer #1: Joss Fong – Producing Science Videos
• SciComm Summer #2: Meryl Horn – Producing “Science Vs”

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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 done on the nature of ambivalence.

(As I mention in the intro, you can also check out Episode 35 with Iris Schneider for more on ambivalence.)

Things that come up in this episode:

• Geoff's early work on ambivalence (Rydell & Durso, 2012)
• The effects of expecting ambivalence (Durso et al., 2021)
• How psychological power makes us delay making decisions when we're ambivalent (Durso et al., 2016)

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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 scientific perspective. He's on the committee for the Science of Magic Association and played a central role in the book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. Today on the podcast, Tony shares his work on the psychology of attention, what we can learn from magicians' expertise in "misdirection," and what science can give back to magic.

Opening the show is a chat with my buddy Erik Tait. Erik has the unique honor of recently placing third in card magic at F.I.S.M., the Olympics of magic. You can watch his winning act below. Erik shares his story of training for the big competition and what he's learned about the psychology of directing attention.

Things that come up in this episode:

• We mention the "Invisible Gorilla" experiment a few times. You can learn more and see a video here.
• For a nice overview of Tony's research on the psychology of magic, check out his 15-minute keynote address for the 2020 American Psychological Association virtual meeting (video)
• Tracking people's attention by recording their eye movements while watching magic tricks (Barnhart & Goldinger, 2014)
• "Microsaccades" (tiny eye movements) reveal whether people are fooled by a magic trick (Barnhart et al., 2019)
• How auditory rhythms can direct visual attention (Barnhart et al., 2018)
• Using "tactical blinking" as misdirection (Barnhart et al., 2022)

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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 some disagreement about what it is, exactly. I was excited to sit down with Tenelle and get her take on intellectual humility, what it does for people, and when we ought to have more or less of it.

Things that come up in this episode:

• For a nice summary of a lot of the things we discuss, check out Tenelle's new review article in Nature Reviews Psychology (Porter et al., 2022a)
• Surveying different definitions of "intellectual humility" to clarify the content of this idea (Porter et al., 2022b)
• Intellectual humility promotes openness to other opinions (Porter & Schumann, 2018)
• Intellectual humility promotes mastery in learning (Porter et al., 2020)
• Classroom environments can shape students' intellectual humility (Porter et al., 2022c)

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