Mikaela Spruill studies juries and the legal system’s role in sustaining social inequalities. She’s a postdoctoral fellow in criminal justice with SPARQ at Stanford University. In our conversation, Mikaela shares the benefits and drawbacks of juries in the courtroom, how scientists study jury decision-making, and how jurors apply very specific legal standards to interpreting the facts of a case. Things that come up in this episodeA very brief history of juries (Alschuler & Deiss, 1994; Carey, 1994; Massachusetts Office of Jury Commissioner)A summary of early research in jury decision-making (Devine et al., 2001) and the University of Chicago Jury Project (Broeder, 1959; Cornwell, 2010)The quick clip in the intro (“I’m just saying a coincidence is possible”) is from the 1957 film, 12 Angry Men.A summary of research on jury decision-making (Spruill & Hans, in press)How jurors apply the “objectively reasonable” standard to interpreting the facts of a case (Spruill & Lewis, 2022; 2023)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

James Druckman studies how political messages can shape people's opinions. He is maybe best known for his work on framing issues as a strategic communication strategy. He also has a recent paper on "a framework for the study of persuasion," which organizes the many variables that matter for persuasion.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Mónica Guzmán wants us to have better conversation with the people we disagree with. She's the Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, and in 2022, she released her book, "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times." This year, she launched a brand new podcast called "A Braver Way," which is about how we can disagree about politics without losing heart. We talk about how to have curious conversations, why we would want to do so, and how we can learn from other peoples' example. For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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.Things that come up in this episode:Mr. Rogers' testimony before a Senate subcommittee.Content analyses of children's entertainment media (Aley et al., 2021; Hahn, 2022; Hahn et al., 2022a)Effects of media on children's and adolescents' morality (Hahn et al., 2022b; 2022a)Analyses of terrorist propaganda (Hahn et al., 2023b)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 cognition, negativity biases, and the relationship between attitudes and behavior.How to cover a whole career in one podcast episode!? We stick to a few highlights. Russ shares some of his earliest work that leapt on a real-world challenge to test basic theoretical ideas, how he was able to push the boundaries of technology to examine how opinions spring to mind automatically, and how a creative video game about beans can reveal deep truths about the human condition.This episode was recorded in person at the WOSU studios! Shout out to them for making the process so easy.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 a four-step model of political discussion. I talked to Taylor about how she got interested in this area, how the book makes sense of how people approach talking politics with others, and what the future holds.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 people's moral sense.In the intro, I talk about Toki Pona--the world's smallest language. You can find more at the official Toki Pona website. I also mentioned interesting work on morality, language, and culture by Emma Buchtel (e.g., Buchtel et al., 2015; Buchtel, 2022).For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 it's not just gorillas. Dan and Chris have a new book out on the psychology behind why people fall prey to scams and cons. It's called: Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It. It's a fun read, full of stories of swindlers and cheats and the science behind how we get taken in by them. We talk about how Dan and Chris became partners in science and what they've learned about the psychology of attention and reasoning.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 episodeDolf 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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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 BanajiThings 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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

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)For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.