#106: Moral Outrage with Kurt Gray

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 & Tormala, 2024) as well as studies showing the costs of being receptive across political party lines (Hussein & Wheeler, 2024). 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.

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 conversation, check out other episodes with moral psychologists whose views differ from Kurt's: Episode 47: Moral Foundations & Political Opinion with Jesse GrahamEpisode 81: Moral Language with Morteza DehghaniFor 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.

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 mention a big new academic book I edited with Richard Petty and Jake Teeny: The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion: Theory and Application.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.

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 social justice. His beautiful body of work was recently showcased in the book Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: Citizen Printer (Letterform Archive, 2024).For a real crossover, you can check out Angelina's 2020-21 exhibition of Amos' work at Poster House: The Letterpress Posters of Amos KennedyFor 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.

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.

*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 and the system it's embedded in, and walks us through what protest is and how we can understand it better.If you're interested to learn more, you can read a great recent summary of Colin's perspective in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (Leach et al., 2024)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.

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 general intro to the ELM. So, I present that full interview here. It gets a little inside baseball at some points, so be aware of that. But it's an interesting glimpse at the random ride that a career in science can be and the number of lucky moments that can steer the wheel.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.

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 the next decade or so, those ideas blossomed into a fully formed theory that continues to inspire persuasion research today.In this episode, I bring you up to speed on the Elaboration Likelihood Models and the incredible stories of happenstance that made it all happen. The foundation of the episode includes an interview with Rich Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University. In the latter half of the episode, we hear from Pablo Briñol, psychology professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Plus, there are some bonus words from Bob Cialdini.If you want to dive really deep into the Elaboration Likelihood Model, check out the 1986 chapter in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). For the updated aspect of the model--"self-validation"--you can check out a recent paper by Pablo and Rich (Briñol & Petty, 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.

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); Albuja et al. (in press).And if you haven’t listened to my episode on the Contact Hypothesis (Episode 44), it pairs well with this one!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.

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 lasting impact (Broockman & Kalla, 2016).On this episode, Dave shares his background in political campaigns and walks us through an actual example of deep canvassing that made a real difference to someone’s attitudes toward transgender people.If you want to know more, check out Dave’s Substack, where he’s written a lot of great articles about his team’s approach to persuasion.Also, doing my due diligence, I’ll link to the movie I mentioned in the intro--“Salesman” (1969)--if you want to dive into classic American cinéma verité.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.