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PODCAST

Opinion Science

A show about the psychology of opinions, where they come from, and how they change. Interviews with experts and deep dives into areas of research uncover the basic psychology of persuasion, communication, and public opinion. Hosted by social psychologist, Andy Luttrell.

science social sciences

All Episodes

58:16

#111: You Don't Know What You Like with Paul Eastwick...

Opinion Science ·

2025/12/01

Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel are two social psychologists who study the gears and levers of romantic relationships. What do people find attractive in a partner? How do relationships evolve over time? And critically, do romantic movies get any of this stuff right? Paul and Eli host the podcast, Love Factually, which dissects popular romantic films from the standpoint of behavioral science. What do they get wrong? What do they get right? On the show this month, we talk about the podcast, how sc...

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52:51

#110: The Value of Entertainment with Sara Grady

Opinion Science ·

2025/11/03

Sara Grady studies the function of entertainment—why we watch, play, and listen to the media that fill our lives. She's an assistant professor of Communication at Ohio State University. In our conversation, we explore what entertainment actually does for us, what it means to connect with fictional characters, and how storytelling shapes our relationships and well-being. Sara also shares her path from film production to media psychology and why understanding stories only deepens their magic.&n...

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53:16

#109: The Realities of Political Persuasion with...

Opinion Science ·

2025/10/06

David Broockman is a political scientist at UC Berkeley who digs into one of democracy’s core questions: can political messages really change minds? He’s spent his career running careful studies of persuasion, from door-to-door conversations to the effects of cable news, and testing whether the confident claims of political consultants actually hold up. In our conversation, David shares the path that brought him into political science and the “credibility revolution” that reshaped how researc...

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52:48

SciComm Summer #26: Lulu Miller on Leading with Story

Opinion Science ·

2025/08/11

Lulu Miller has done a lot of things and done them very well. She is currently the co-host of Radiolab and its family-friendly spinoff, Terrestrials. She also co-created Invisibilia with Alix Spiegel and wrote the beautiful book, Why Fish Don't Exist. In our conversation, I try to learn Lulu's secrets when it comes it sharing science across media. I've been a fan of her work for a long time, so it was great to get to talk with her! (If you're here as a Radiolab fan, you should also check out ...

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51:45

SciComm Summer #25: Sarah McAnulty on Art and...

Opinion Science ·

2025/08/04

Sarah McAnulty is a squid biologist and a science communicator. She's come up with all sorts of creative ways to bring science to the people, especially through local community engagement initiatives. Learn more about Skype a Scientist: https://www.skypeascientist.com/ You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here. For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/ Learn more about Opinion Science at h...

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51:38

SciComm Summer #24: Joe Palca on NPR Science Reporting

Opinion Science ·

2025/07/28

Joe Palca reported on science for NPR for years. He found his sweet spot, capturing people's interest and filling them in on curious new findings in just a few minutes. His path to this job wasn't all that direct, and in our conversation, he shares how he got there and what he's learned along the way. Listen to his 2019 story on the "electric dipole moment": Scientists Studying EDM To Find Why Everything In The Universe Exists : NPR You can find the rest of this summer's science communic...

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54:40

SciComm Summer #23: Alison Fragale on Giving Keynote...

Opinion Science ·

2025/07/21

Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist who gives keynote talks and leads workshops outside academia. She talks frankly about what it takes to book speaking engagements, design powerful talks that make a difference, and juggle a speaking schedule with other commitments. She also just released a book -- Likable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here. For a transcript of this episode, visit this e...

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61:05

SciComm Summer #22: Alex Dainis on Producing Online...

Opinion Science ·

2025/07/14

Alex Dainis is a freelance science communicator and video producer. She's been making science videos on YouTube for years, including recent work for the American Chemical Society. In 2024, she was received an Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and the Schmidt Foundation. We talk about how she started down this road and decided to make it her full-time work after graduate school, including the challenges of freelanci...

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52:13

SciComm Summer #21: Joel Bervell on Short Form Video

Opinion Science ·

2025/07/07

Joel Bervell recently graduated from medical school, which is when he gained fame as an influencer helping the public navigate good medical science. He’s out there breaking down myths about medicine, particularly shining a light on racial disparities in health and treatment. He recently won a Peabody award, consults with the White House, has given interviews on various media platforms, and has given talks all over. He hosts the podcast, The Dose. And he developed an animated children’s ...

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55:30

SciComm Summer #20: Adam Cole on Making "Howtown"

Opinion Science ·

2025/06/30

Kicking off the 3rd season of Hot SciComm Summer is Adam Cole. Adam started at NPR’s Science Desk in 2011 where he started making short videos and radio pieces. In 2014, he launched the YouTube channel Skunk Bear with NPR, which was a venue for fun, quirky, visual forays into science stories big and small. After NPR, he did work for Vox, including their Netflix series, “The Mind, Explained” in 2019. Most recently, Adam’s work came on my radar again because he’s one half of the new YouTube cha...

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1:59

Introducing "Hot SciComm Summer"...Season 3!

Opinion Science ·

2025/06/23

You didn't think #HotSciCommSummer was done, did you? Join me for a whole new season of Hot SciComm summer, a special laid-back podcast series featuring writers, podcast producers, video producers, speakers, and more. Get ready to hear from seven more top-notch science communicators and hear how they got into this area, how they approach their communication, and what you can learn about doing it yourself. The new season is still aimed at science journalists and scientists interested in sharin...

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57:23

#108: Characters Matter with Matt Grizzard

Opinion Science ·

2025/06/02

Matt Grizzard is a communication scholar who studies how people relate to characters in entertainment media as a sign of how much they enjoy one story versus another. A guiding framework behind this work is "affective disposition theory." What is that? Well, listen to the episode! We talk about this theory, how it helps us understand people's reactions to what happens to characters in media, and what it means for the importance of entertainment in our everyday experience. For a transcri...

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51:22

#107: Showing Open-Mindedness with Mohamed Hussein

Opinion Science ·

2025/05/05

Mohamed Hussein studies how the psychology of persuasion and politics interact. He is an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. On the podcast, we talk about his work on "receptiveness," or people's openness to hearing out opinions they disagree with. (For more on receptiveness, check out episode 56, Receptiveness to Other Opinions with Julia Minson). But the research we talk about includes studies on how "you" versus "we" language affects how receptive we seem (Hussein...

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52:32

#106: Moral Outrage with Kurt Gray

Opinion Science ·

2025/04/07

Kurt Gray studies our moral minds and how we grapple with everyday ethics. In his new book, Outraged, he explores the deep psychology of human nature and what it means for how we navigate politically divisive times. In our conversation, we do a deep dive into his perspective that morality is fundamentally about our ideas of harm, which conflicts with how other theories talk about morality. We also get into what it means for concepts to shift with time or circumstance. If you like this convers...

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58:34

#105: Targeted Messaging Online with Sandra Matz

Opinion Science ·

2025/03/03

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...

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59:59

#104: Posters as Persuasion with Angelina Lippert...

Opinion Science ·

2025/02/03

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 about posters in the digital age. At the top of the show, we hear from Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. He's a letterpress printer who puts ink to paper to spread messages about ...

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45:06

#103: Taking Extreme Action with Joe Siev

Opinion Science ·

2025/01/06

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

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53:17

#102: Protest with Colin Wayne Leach

Opinion Science ·

2024/12/02

*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 research areas, including emotion, prejudice, and morality.In our conversation, we focus on his work on protest as a vehicle for social change. He shares how he thinks about protest ...

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72:18

#101: Studying Persuasion with Rich Petty

Opinion Science ·

2024/11/04

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 telling the story of the ELM. Go check that out if you haven't already. But my full conversation with Rich was also great and went in a few directions that just didn't fit into a ...

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52:54

#100: A Unified Model of Persuasion

Opinion Science ·

2024/10/21

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 possible to understand how persuasion works. In the course of studying for an exam in graduate school, Rich and John started sketching out some ways to make sense of things. Over ...

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159 results

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