Opinion Science

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 research areas, including emotion, prejudice, and morality. In our conversation, we focus on his wo

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

Drs. Sarah Gaither and Analia Albuja study racial identity and how we can overcome racial biases. They just published an important new study on the effects of random roommate assignments on students’ ability to develop diverse social networks. Our conversation focuses on two key research papers: Gaither & Sommers (2013

Dave Fleischer is a political organizer who led the team that pioneered “deep canvassing,” which is a particularly effective form of face-to-face persuasion. It was developed on the ground, but when political scientists put it to a rigorous test, they found that these brief conversations with voters were having a lasti

Christian Wheeler studies the intersection of opinions, communication, and personal identity. He’s a professor of management and marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In our conversation, we talk about the quirks of teaching in a business school, the promise of improv exercises for learning life skills