How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination, despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence. … This literature about misperception was lucidly summarized by Christopher Graves, the […] Read more »
Will Sanders Supporters Come Around?
Looming over the Democratic National Convention this week was the threat of party division. Will the rift between Hillary Clinton’s supporters and Bernie Sanders’s supporters be mended? Or will there be a failure to reconcile, imperiling the effort to defeat Donald J. Trump in the presidential election? We are not […] Read more »
The challenge of false beliefs
Misperceptions about politics and health can undermine public debate and distort people’s choices and behavior. Why do people hold these false or unsupported beliefs and why is it so difficult to change their minds? An emerging literature examines the difficulty of correcting false or unsupported beliefs and the reasons for […] Read more »
In Iowa, Voting Science at Work
Of the two winners of the Iowa caucuses, who’s the better behavioral scientist, Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton? To judge from their campaigns’ respective “get out the vote” efforts, both politicians seem to have studied up on recent research in the field. CONT. Todd Rogers & Adan Acevedo (Harvard Kennedy […] Read more »
Predicted Market Research Trends for 2016
What trends should market researchers expect in 2016? To find out, we asked a variety of executives and thought leaders to share their predictions for the coming year. Our sources include industry veterans at established firms, as well as a number of innovative entrepreneurs. CONT. Sarah Schmidt, MarketResearch.com Read more »
How Is the Economy Doing? It May Depend on Your Party, and $1
… It turns out that the partisan bias in how people answer factual questions about the economy is diminished by this one weird trick: Pay people. That is a conclusion reached in two new papers in The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, one from four scholars led by John G. […] Read more »