Opinion Science

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 yo

Angelina Lippert is the Executive Director and Curator at Poster House in New York City. She is an expert when it comes to the use of posters as a tool for mass communication and persuasion. We talk about what a poster is, the history of posters as a medium, the social effects they have, and why we should still care ab

Joe Siev studies extreme political behavior and its appeal. He"s a postdoctoral fellow at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. In our conversation, we talk about his research linking people"s sense of ambivalence with their willingness to take extreme action. For a transcript of this episode, vi

*If you downloaded this episode early, the wrong file was uploaded. Sorry! We"re all good now. Colin Wayne Leach is a social psychologist who also wears a bunch of other social science hats. He approaches the social world by appreciating its nature as a system of interconnected parts. He"s made strides in a lot of rese

Dr. Richard Petty is a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. He"s probably best known for co-developing the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion (but he"s done a lot of other stuff, too). He was also my advisor in grad school. In the last episode of Opinion Science, Rich lent his voice to tellin

In the 1980s, two social psychologists--Rich Petty and John Cacioppo--devised a new way to make sense of persuasion: the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Their work came on the heels of an era in psychology when people were fed up with persuasion research. The old studies were a mess, and it wasn"t clear if it was even po