New to Opinion Science and don’t know where to start? Here are a few episodes that are a good introduction to the show. It’s a mix of my personal favorites and episodes that have proven to be most popular, all of which give a glimpse into our opinions, where they come from, and how they change.
(But of course, don’t stop at just these episodes–every episode of this show has a special place in my heart. You can find a list of all past episodes here.)
Deep Dives
I love diving deep into an area of research or example of opinion and persuasion in the world, compiling a bunch of interviews and weaving them together to tell a bigger story. Here are some of those episodes:
#100: A Unified Model of Persuasion – After decades of careful research on persuasion, scientists were frustrated by the confusing mix of emerging findings. That is, until Rich Petty and John Cacioppo tried to make sense of the chaos. Their solution–the Elaboration Likelihood Model–proved to be an influential approach to understanding how and when messages change minds.
Special: They Thought We Were Ridiculous – A 5-episode series on the story of “Behavioral Economics.” We talk to Nobel laureates and other influential scientists about the wild assumptions economists make and their scrappy mission to prove them wrong. What was once a fringe academic movement now informs businesses and governments around the world.
#50: To Persuade is Human? – IBM Research spent years building Project Debater, an artificial intelligence system that should be able to debate any topic and change real people’s minds. It’s a computer program that’s gone head-to-head against champion (human) debaters, but how does it do? And does it mean that persuasion is not a uniquely human ability?
#44: The Contact Hypothesis – Back in the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport proposed that we could reduce prejudice in our society if we could just get different groups to have meaningful contact with each other. But does that actually work? We hear from one of Allport’s own students, a political scientist who set up mixed-religion soccer teams in Iraq, and an economist who studied whether slum relocation projects in India changed inter-caste prejudices.
#20: The Cognitive Dissonance Episode – “Cognitive dissonance” is one of those concepts from psychology that’s gone mainstream, but where did it come from? We see how a 1934 earthquake in India, indigenous cultures’ initiation rituals, and the world’s most boring experiment set the stage for one of the most influential theories in the social sciences…and the controversies that followed.
Long-Form Interviews
Most episodes of Opinion Science focus on an interview with a social scientist or professional communicator to explore their expertise about public opinion and communication. A few particularly memorable ones:
#83: The Fundamental Nature of Opinion with Russ Fazio – A titan in the field of social psychology shares his groundbreaking research on how people learn what’s good and what’s bad.
#72: Fighting Against Misinformation with Sander van der Linden – People’s willingness to believe false claims can have dire consequences. Dr. van der Linden has been studying how we can help people avoid misinformation.
#64: Saving Democracy with Robb Willer – In an innovative new kind of experiment, Dr. Willer’s team invited people to submit their ideas for how to foster a more productive democracy, and then they put those ideas to the test.
#37: Influence with Robert Cialdini – The “godfather of persuasion” himself chats about why he started studying persuasion and the impact of his super popular book, Influence.
#21: More Influence Than You Realize with Vanessa Bohns – Just after finishing the manuscript for her excellent book, Dr. Bohns shared her research on how people too often underestimate the influence they have on other people.
#16: Implicit Bias with Mahzarin Banaji – The co-creator of the (in)famous “implicit association test” that’s used to measure implicit bias all over the world shares how this test came about, why she started studying implicit prejudices, and whether there’s hope for changing people’s biases.
#9: Systemic Racism with Phia Salter – There’s a lot of talk about racism as something that’s “systemic,” but it can be confusing to know what that means. Dr. Salter shares her work on systemic racism and the difference between racism as an individual bias versus a “system.”
