Lindsay Hahn studies how entertainment media convey moral messages, especially among children. She’s an assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo, where she leads the Media Psychology and Morality Lab. We talk about her background, how her team surveys media for the moral lessons they communicate, and how her new work is turning an eye to terrorist propaganda...
Russ Fazio has spent his career getting to the bottom of how opinions work. From his first study as a college student in 1974 to a leading expert in basically everything, his work has had a deep impact on the field of social psychology (and communication and political science…) His research over the years has included game-changing work on cognitive dissonance, implicit bias, automatic...
Taylor Carlson studies how people navigate political discussions. She does a bunch of interesting work, but I was most interested in talking with her about book she published with Jaime Settle last year. It’s called What Goes Without Saying: Navigating Political Discussion in America. In it, they report their findings from a variety of surveys and experiments and organize them into...
Morteza Dehghani is a psychologist and computer scientist who uses sophisticated analytics to churn through the words we use when we talk to each other. From that, he and his colleagues can get an idea of people’s moral sensibilities and the consequences of letting morality imbue our opinions on important issues. We talk about his origins in the field and the key insights he’s come to about...
Dan Simons and Chris Chabris are psychological scientists who care about attention and reasoning. They’re probably best known for their groundbreaking experiments on “inattentional blindness” where they built a scenario in which people would look straight at someone in a gorilla costume and not even know it. The point is: for as smart as we are, we miss a lot of stuff. And...
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...
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. This conversation explores how we learn about other people through...
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...
