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...
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...
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 understand consumer behavior. Does looking at brain signals give us anything special when we try to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
