Person
Christopher Bryan
Associate Professor of Business, Government and Society, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin
Guest in Episode 158. Social psychologist studying how subtle noun-vs-verb language shifts change motivation and behavior. His research career in this area began after hearing psychologist Susan Gelman present her and Gail Heyman's carrot-eater study (see Gelman Heyman Carrot-Eater Identity Study), and after learning of Greg Walton and Mazarin Banaji's follow-up self-perception study (see Walton Banaji Coke-Drinker Self-Perception Study).
Starting in 2004, Bryan ran an escalating series of voter-registration and turnout studies asking respondents about "being a voter" versus "voting" — a small Stanford pilot, a larger Stanford sample matched to actual voting records, then a nationally representative probability sample ahead of a New Jersey election (see Bryan Be-a-Voter Turnout Studies). The finding was subsequently adopted into California voter-registrar campaigns and into behavioral-science advice given to the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. He extended the same technique to reducing cheating (see Bryan Cheater-Framing Coin-Flip Study) and increasing children's willingness to help with chores (see Bryan Helper-Framing Nursery Study), while also documenting real failure cases where the technique backfires — an "energy saver" identity that read as childish to college students, and a "supporter of the arts" identity that implied more ongoing burden than a plain "support the arts" ask.
Discussed in
- Episode 158 — 158-voter-vs-vote-how-one-letter-changed-elections