Spring 2023 Colloquia

Monday, April 10, 2023

Public Opinion Polling to Inform Policy: Balancing Discipline and Agility

ABSTRACT: As part of an overall effort to provide information and analysis to inform national health policy discussions, KFF has been conducting public opinion research for more than 30 years. A main goal of our Public Opinion and Survey Research program has always been to amplify the voices of people in policy debates, particularly the voices of marginalized populations that are often overlooked, including members of racial and ethnic minority groups, people with lower incomes, the uninsured, and those with serious health problems. In this talk, I will discuss KFF’s approach to survey research, one that balances discipline (the methodological rigor required to represent the voices of hard-to-survey populations) with agility (the flexibility needed to produce information that can help inform policy debates in real time). Two case studies I will discuss are KFF’s tracking of the public’s opinions and experiences during the debate, passage, implementation, and repeal attempts of the Affordable Care Act from 2008-2018; and the COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor that we launched in late 2020 to track evolving attitudes and experiences with COVID vaccines. I will also describe how we approach communications at KFF, including partnering with news media organizations as a way to extend the reach and impact of our research.

Liz Hamel, Director Public Opinion and Survey Research at the Kaiser Family Foundation

Monday, April 17, 2023

Algorithm-mediated social learning and its impact on political psychology

ABSTRACT: As individuals and political leaders increasingly take to online networks for social interactions, it is important to understand how the platforms that host them can shape social knowledge of morality and politics. In this work, I propose that features of social media environments including dysfunctional human-algorithm interactions may be conducive to misperceptions of moral emotions at the individual and group level with consequences for intergroup conflict. Utilizing a Twitter field survey, I measured authors’ outrage in real time and compared author reports to judgments made by observers. I find that social media users tend to overperceive moral outrage expression at the individual-level, inferring more intense outrage experiences from messages than the authors of those messages themselves actually report. Individual-level overperceptions were also associated with greater social media use to learn about politics. Follow-up experiments find that these individual misperceptions cause misperceptions of collective outrage, which also amplifies perceptions of hostile communication norms, group affective polarization and ideological extremity. In a second line of work I examine how political misinformation exploits overperception of outrage online to spread through social networks. Together, these results highlight how individual-level misperceptions of online emotions produce collective misperceptions that have the potential to exacerbate intergroup conflict. I end with considerations for content moderation on digital social platforms.

Billy Brady, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Monday, April 24, 2023

What You Don’t Know Can Still Hurt You: Correcting Black Misperceptions about the Racial Wealth Gap

ABSTRACT: In the wake of the 2020 protests for racial justice, renewed attention has been focused on persistent levels of inequality between Blacks and Whites. Arguably, the most staggering measure of inequality is the racial wealth gap.  Previous scholarship has shown that African Americans are generally misinformed about the magnitude of this economic divide. However, researchers know very little about whether informing Blacks about this phenomenon would dispel these misperceptions and induce greater support for policies designed to reduce or eliminate it. Additionally, little is known about the demographic and attitudinal moderators that might facilitate African American receptiveness to corrective information about the racial wealth gap. In this paper, we examine these questions with three online survey experiments regarding what Blacks know about the racial wealth gap, whether their misperceptions can be corrected, and whether exposure to accurate information about this gap leads to greater support for race-targeted policy remedies. Across each of our studies we find some limited evidence that misperceptions can be dispelled, but almost no indication in our overall samples that such interventions lead to greater support for remedial policies. We also find some evidence, however, that subsets within the Black community are more receptive to corrective information than are others, with consistent evidence in Study 3 that Black college graduates respond to our treatments.  We speculate that this greater receptivity may be due to greater attentiveness to Black elite political discourse. 

Vince Hutchings, Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan

Monday, May 15, 2023

A Life in Market Research

ABSTRACT: Market research has been a critical tool that Laurie has used strategically in the various roles in her advertising and marketing career.  In her talk, Laurie will share examples of the types of research used to drive key decisions and day to day needs at Kraft, McDonald’s, Walt Disney World, and Quaker. You will learn the key role that market research plays in informing all kinds of business decisions ranging from new product innovation to brand development to consumer target selection to TV commercial production to marketing effectiveness measurement.  

Laurie Stearn, Distinguished Careers Institute at Stanford University