Show Notes
Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist at Columbia Business School. She uses big data to understand people and what motivates them to act. And she has a new book out! It's Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior, and it's an enjoyable, easy-to-read introduction to what your online data say about who you are and how communicators can use those insights to serve up compelling content--for better or worse. At the top of the show, I also m...
More from Opinion Science
On a special bonus episode, we welcome back Dr. Vanessa Bohns, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She recently released her second book, "Should I Say Something?: The Science of What to Share--And What to Keep to Yourself." This episode is from the series of bonus video podcasts I've been doing over at Patreon. But this month, everyone gets the whole episode in the main feed. You can watch the video over at Patreon, though. These have been fun, casual conversatio...
Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson uses a bunch of creative research tools to tackle big questions about psychology, culture, and history. By examining historical records, modern writing, and global surveys (among other things), he and his colleagues can trace the trajectory of cultures over time. In our conversation, he helps me understand what "cultural evolution" means, how cultures have gotten more different (not more similar), and how historical records can shed light on the psychology of p...
Rhia Catapano studies what happens when people think of an opinion in terms of what they support versus what they oppose. It turns out that this simple difference carries important implications. Even if we're talking about the same basic opinion, something shifts when it's about support than opposition. In our conversation, Rhia shares her findings and what it means for people who want to communicate more effectively. At the top of the show, I discuss Issue 1 in Ohio from 2023. Most of the ba...
Demi Oba is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School. He studies the nature of communication. In our conversation, Demi shares some recent research on the different types of "hedges" people make when expressing uncertainty in a claim. These types of uncertainty matter for how persuasive a person can be. In fact, sometimes, being the right kind of uncertain can be more influential than expressing confidence. Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScience ...
Jae-Hee Jung is an assistant professor at Rice University, where she studies party politics, political behavior, and political psychology in Western democracies. Her research focuses on the strategic use of moral rhetoric (i.e., appeals to fundamental notions of right and wrong) and how it shapes political competition and voter psychology. We talk about her work analyzing political manifestos, the psychological mechanisms like pride that mobilize a party's base, and the surprising finding tha...