Alright everybody, are you ready for our final time to interact with not the panelists on not the panel Frank Show? Yeah? Yeah? Alright, well we’ll be interacting with you and we’ll be actually throwing things out on the audience as you’ll get the opportunity to ask questions so some of those will be a brain and a heart, you know the metaphor here that we’re appealing to hearts and minds which scientifically, not the greatest metaphor, most of all the heart as we think about it feelings is in the brain inside here, even like the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex they’re not really that separated as we think we are but you know, what do I know, I’m just a scientist so here we go, we are going to be bringing them out here on stage and we are going to be throwing these to you and I just want you guys to remember as we’re throwing these to you, even though we’re throwing this metaphor you’re only going to get one but as always whenever we’re doing these things it’s both of them together, right? Because look how cute this is, look how cute this is, isn’t this the intersectional marriage that you would like to go see? So let’s make sure that we’re always marrying those ideas together, all right, Annie, I think we’re ready. All right, so here’s our super secret special guest, Erin Hart! Chief Innovation Officer, Gator, Chief Innovation Officer at Spitfire, Gator, excellent podium pusher, Erin Hart. Thank you, the entire glue budget was not used on the podium but for Bedazzling. Erin’s going to tell you a little bit about what’s going to happen while Troy and I get the stage together. Yes, thank you. So this is the moment you’ve been waiting for, I’m now officially a game show host. So as Troy and Annie have shared with you, we obviously, when we’re doing the work that we’re doing and I say we as practitioners because unfortunately this game show thing is not a full-time gig, I too am a practitioner and when we’re doing that we’re looking at how we do reach hearts and minds, hence our really awesome and very realistic stuffed animals. So we’re going to be asking a handful of questions to each of the researchers. We’re going to go through a couple of rapid fire questions because it’s a game show and then you guys are going to get to ask a few questions. You may win a prize, you may win a prize, you may not because I’m not Oprah. There’s only going to be a limited number of prizes here people, so ask a really good question. So are we prepared? Is our stage ready? Almost, almost. It’s almost ready. It’s working, it’s okay. Do you have more you’d like to share with us? No, just that I apologize for being so wrong. Oh, we’re good. We’re really good. This is true. Should I throw one of them to the individuals before they take the question and then take it back? If you want to. Yeah, sure. All right, are you guys ready to welcome not our panelists but our guests? Do the Frank Show? Yes? All right, I think it is time. So let’s please welcome Chelsea, Erica, and Hannah. Oh, okay. I mean, they told me that I was. Yeah. Oh, they told you you were a celebrity. But I was in the middle. Excellent game show dancing. I like it. All right, are you all in your right places? Yes. All right, this is working. Okay, great. So round one, we have three questions for you to get things rolling. So we’ve talked a lot about the fact that it is no secret that we live in a really polarized world. So as we’ve had this conversation over the last few days and we’ve talked about the need to connect to bridge this gulf between progressives and conservatives, like for each of you to share with us, how something from your research can help us to do that. So this time we’ll start from left to right. Chelsea, how can your research help us to do that? Sure. So I think in the spirit of Frank, I’m going to tell a story instead of talking about specific research. So when my research paper came out a few years ago, my advisor and I co-wrote a New York Times editorial about our paper talking about how liberals can better understand conservatives and how conservatives can better understand liberals. And it was specifically about the issue of gay marriage. And in response to this editorial, we got a letter from a North Carolinian pastor. And usually when I get these letters, they’re kind of hateful because I talk very much in favor of gay marriage. But he said something very different. He thanked me for taking the time and listening to where he was coming from. He said most of the time he feels that he’s being demonized. But we were saying, no, you have reasons behind your beliefs. We don’t agree with your reasons, but you’re not being evil. You’re not intentionally trying to hurt other people. And in keeping that perspective in mind, keeping the perspective that we need to stop and we need to listen and understand can be a really powerful tool. Great. Thank you, Chelsea. All right, Hannah? Yeah. So polarization is accompanied by a set of beliefs and a set of behaviors. And so that means people ask you, do you have friends who are Republicans? Right? Is it OK in your group to have friends who are Republicans or who have different political beliefs than you do? And that’s all sort of you get these cues from the people around you about whether that’s an OK thing or not OK thing. Is it OK to go do these initiatives that now exist that emerged after the election, like having dinner with someone from a different political party than you? Are your friends doing that? Are your friends not doing that? Right? Like, we’re getting these cues about sort of is this what one should be doing in this era? And so the research has really sort of has that in mind. Are we getting signals from the people around us that we should be actively doing things to address polarization? And I think we can all ask ourselves, is this what’s happening for us? It’s not happening for me. But I think that’s the goal is to try to figure out how to change those kind of norms for ourselves and also on the other side. But we have to start with where we are and what we’re doing now. The other side of it, of course, is that in addition to sort of living in these media bubbles, we’re also living in real life segregated network bubbles, the institutions that used to bring us together no longer exist. So if we think about sort of networks being segregated, more segregated now along political lines, that’s the other piece of the story. Thank you, Hannah. Eric, you’re up. I am. I’m going to piggyback on my fellow researchers, but point out that polarization is not just political and it’s not just ideological. Your political identity and your ideological sort of perspectives are also really implicated in other elements of your identity, right? So who you are, your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your cultural background, your geography, right? As someone who lives in Texas, I sort of understand that very much. And so understanding the importance of identity and the different identities people bring to the table and the complexities and the contradictions that exist with those different identity categories. And so understanding the pieces of the puzzle that individuals bring to the table when we’re having these conversations, understanding their gender, understanding the way their social class and their geographic location or their religion or all of those things work together to form their ideological position is super important. Understanding that politics don’t exist in bubbles, but that are part of the larger story that we need tools to unearth and unmind. So. Thank you. That was a perfect pivot to our second question. And our second question is just yesterday Troy talked about the insights that you share and that researchers share with us as tools. Those research insights are tools that we can all use in our work. So I’d like for each of you to share with us a little bit about what you would say your tool is used for, the primary insight from your research. And Hannah, we’ll start with you this time. Oh, thanks. Okay. So I have this sort of three part tool, right? Attention to local norms, attention to the people in a group who are best able to kind of change perceptions of those norms and using network principles to identify those people. So my tool is really for organic group based behavior change. Nice. And it sounds like it’s a tiny Swiss Army knife. Yeah, many things. Yes. That has many things that flip out. I like it. Erica. Okay. So my tool is what I call an ethnographic approach. Okay. So what that means, let me unpack that a little bit for you. It means interviewing in depth participants. It means doing focus groups. It means doing participant observation. It means doing media scanning, right? It’s all of that qualitative, deep information that we can’t get from survey data or experimental data. So it’s all of that other stuff. And it’s not to undermine the quantitative, but to understand the value of the qualitative in supplementing and complimenting the quantitative. So often organizations are data driven, but we need to unpack that and ask ourselves what are our limitations of the quantitative of the survey of the experiment and supplement it with the deep, rich data that qualitative and ethnographic research affords. Thank you. Chelsea. And that’s what your tool is like. Thank you, Erin. So now, surprisingly, my tool is going to be psychological as a psychologist. One of the things that we want to achieve is we want to change hearts and minds. But oftentimes we kind of project our own thinking onto other people. And so what we can do as psychologists is take the time and actually what all of us can do, we don’t have to be psychologists and to kind of perspective take what the other person is thinking and try to match their thinking to how we’re engaging in this dialogue. Very helpful. Thank you. All right. One more question for this group before we go into speed round. All right. So last question. So we have a lot of folks here in our audience who are in some way working to address inclusion and think about how do we give everyone access and is whether that’s to health care or quality education. So in reflecting on your research, what element of it can we think about that’s going to help make all of these facets of our world more accessible to everyone? And so you’re first up this time, Erica. Oh, awesome. Okay. So one of my big takeaways is thinking globally and locally and empowering the communities that are already doing the work that your organization and your mission and vision are driving. So thinking about the people, the voices out there, the stories that are out there. So much of this conference has been focused on design and thinking about the existing narratives out there. How can you as an organization sort of tap into that and tell those stories and use your power, right? We have power in this room that we have to recognize. How do we use our power to lift up those that are less empowered? And I think there’s a certain obligation and certain calling that we need to sort of address with that. So yeah, using our power to sort of elevate the marginalized, the most marginalized, and bringing them up and including them in our larger narrative. So that you’re not on the margins, right? So they are part of the fabric. Great. Everyone got that? Got it. All right. Chelsea. So I’m going to take a risk. I know this is Friday morning. You’ve had a lot of science. I’m going to try introducing a little bit more science. So bear with me. So one of the equity issues that I care most about personally is health care equity. So what I do as a scientist is I try to figure out over the past year, why is it that some people don’t seem to care that not everyone has health care? So I ran a study and what I found is that perceptions of responsibility for an illness is inversely related to how much we care, how much concern, how much harm we see. And what I also found is that conservatives were seeing illnesses as more likely to be caused by this internal responsibility and that internal responsibility was in leading to less perceived need to help. And so it’s remembering not only where do the other people perceive harm, it’s also remembering that perceived vulnerability matters and it’s seen in different ways. So thank you for bearing, I like to say, more science. I know there’s a lot really. Okay. We have both, remember? Yeah. We can do this. Super, please. Yeah. So I mean, as we’ve talked about and everyone’s been talking about these are very, very complicated issues. There’s lots of things going into them. One way to think about them is to break down what’s going on into sort of how to think about what are the behaviors that are relevant. So that’s one piece of this. So how do we get black women to get more screening for mammograms? How do we get kids at school to like care about homework? How do we get, you know, we do GeoTV efforts for people, for candidates who are interested in criminal justice reform. All of those things can be broken down into specific behaviors that are rooted in communities. So the way to, one way to approach these things is to think about the pieces in terms of behavior and in terms of the groups that they’re rooted in and trying to sort of use the insights from, you know, what I’ve been talking about to, to make sure that those behaviors can be targeted directly, both, both the positive behaviors and the negative behaviors. Great. Thank you. All right. So you know what that means. We’re ready for round two, the speed round. Are you ready for the speed round? All right. Let’s be encouraging. Speed round. All right. That was really feeble, really feeble. Yeah. Yeah. One more time. Speed round. All right. Are you ready? We’re going to go from left to right. Have just a handful of questions. So first, who’s your favorite researcher and why? Yes. Okay. So I have a lot of really senior research crushes, but I want to kind of bring up another junior researcher. So write down this guy’s name. His name is Matt Modal. M-O-T-Y-L is the last name. He’s at University of Illinois, Chicago. You guys should get him here next year. I’m looking at you, Annie. It’s really cool work on political tolerance. All right. Thank you. My person is Peter Bearman, is a sociologist at Columbia who thinks in structural network terms about pretty much everything. So he’s mapped sort of the sexual networks of adolescents. He has done the local political structure of 16th century English elites. He studies how autism epidemics sort of become epidemics, how it’s a social thing based on sort of networks of doctors who give autism diagnoses. And it’s just a really kind of neat tool for looking at the world to think of it in what sociologists call the structural terms, but it’s sort of thinking about it in terms of networks. Peter Bearman. And thank you. I hope you’re writing this down because I don’t have a pen. So thank you. My answer is Kimberly Crenshaw. She is the woman who coined intersectionality. She has a TED talk. She is a political legal scholar and activist. She brings the fight to the streets and to the sheets, academic sheets. So yeah. We’re supposed to make you hot yesterday during 7th. So yeah, check out Kimberly Crenshaw. She is one of my academic founders and crushes. Excellent. All right. Next speed question. And this is really important because this is a really interesting connection point, I think, for researchers and practitioners in the room. If you could design your dream project, what would it be? Yes. You’re up again. Okay. So as psychologists, we often try to isolate people in labs to get at the most control. But what I want to do is go to the places where people are actually having these conversations. I want to run a Thanksgiving Day study. And I’m not joking. This is fully serious. I want to get a randomized controlled trial going where we train some grannies to have a certain type of dialogue and see if that leads to less angry tweets at the end of dinner to lead to longer dialogue. Excellent. Hannah. Yeah. I’m trying to like do this dream study right now, which is trying to figure out what are the best ways to use other kinds of data to identify what are the structures of workplaces that make it optimal for organizing of all sorts of kinds. But basically, how can we sort of use these insights to apply at scale for a really important goal of shoring up the labor movement? Excellent. So Hannah’s living. All right. Erica. Okay. My research project would allow me to go to the global south. So much of what we talk about in this room is so Anglo-centric, so Western. I want the funds and the safety, more importantly, to be able to go to the global south, to the Middle East, to Asian countries, to talk to people and activists in those spaces in ways that are safe. One of the things that resonates most from when I started my research was this particular anecdote. One of the managers at the organization I was working with told me about these two young gay teens in Iran who watch these videos in fear in their closets, literally looking for moments of hope. So I’d like to go to those spaces and talk to those people. But in my dream project, I’d like to be able to do that in a space that allows safety for my participants. So it’s very much of a pipe dream. Great. Thank you. Yeah. All right. So speedy speed round because we want to use our time well. We’re going to have time for just a few questions from the audience. So the scribbles that you’ve been making for the last couple of days, the things you’ve been saving, now is the time for those. Keep your questions short. Thank you for bringing up the studio lights. And raise your hand if you have a question, please. And either Troy or Annie will come to you with a microphone. Minus. Troy is this. Is there a switch? Do we have a switch? If you could change one thing about what you see in communication specifically to that this social interest and social impact, what would it be? Is there something that’s driving you crazy that you want us in communications to stop doing? Great question. All right. So we’re just going to have one responder. So who wants to take this one? Not me. Okay. I’ll take it. Audience centric thinking, right? Understanding your audiences. So much focus goes on message creation and great idea generation. But if it doesn’t resonate with your audience, then you’re missing the mission and the vision of what you’re trying to do. So understanding deeply your audiences. Great. Thank you. We have another question. We have another mic over here. Hello. So I guess I’ll just be blunt. All of you that are on the stage pretty much look similar, right? By way of race, maybe there’s different ethnicities, you know, within all of you. But what are you doing or what can be done to add more color to this industry? Sorry. By this industry, do you mean academia or do you mean your industry? Your industry. Okay. Yeah. Great. Sure. So. Oh, go for it. Sure. So this is. Oh, wait. Go ahead. Sorry. I thought there’s only one. Go ahead. Am I going to have to get up here and take care of this or we can. Yeah. Who’s going? Sorry. Yeah. I mean, so the discussion in sociology in particular is about the pipeline and sort of starting people early. And there’s so much that we can do at each stage about sort of getting kids interested in science, sort of in high school, in college, and then making sure that the transition to graduate school is actually something that works. So our discussion is like we are trying to, you know, our chair is going to high schools around New Jersey to kind of talk to kids to talk to them about what science means, so that we can get them early into the pipeline. There’s so many initiatives to try to get students of color and underrepresented students to graduate school. I mean, this favorite thing about my department is how seriously they take that. It’s not so that I can just that’s just my personal experience. But it obviously needs to be so much more systematic than it is. But the pipeline is sort of what we’re focusing on right now. Can I answer this question? I have to be one. I’m going to answer it. You got to keep it fair. Yeah. I can answer the question then. So I think what we have to do is say. No, one per, one per. We said one per. I think we have to stop patting ourselves on the back. Because I think when we’re in academic circles, we often feel like, oh, we have like some representation that’s good enough and we get complacent. And we think like, oh, yeah, like because the leaders are white and we forget that we’re not actually doing much. So we nod and we think we’re doing well. And that just stops us from actually listening. Okay, next question. Yeah, we’ve changed it now. So yes, I was trying to get the rules around the window. Yeah, this is all going to get cut from the final show. I fear. I feel casually about this question. I don’t know. I’m rethinking my career, you guys. I don’t know. Okay, I guess I’ll respond as well. So I think we need the we need attention to the structural inequalities that exist, which means providing funding as well as local efforts, mentorships that exist between undergraduate students and professors and demystifying that experience. I live on campus at the University of Houston. And so I engage with my students in the dining hall. And we’re at a majority minority university. So them seeing me in my jammies is a really small microact that I think sort of humanizes faculty and researchers. Yeah, so great. Thank you. All right, another question. Annie’s coming to you on the other side. Don’t follow her. Annie wants that side. I think we have a research riff, please. Hi, how do we get donors to take qualitative research more seriously and to really substantively use that in their understanding of situations? Let’s do one response on this, if we could. I think the real challenge would be to have her answer that. No, not to get in sort of a turf war methodologically, but the reality is that numbers do drive funding, right? And so I don’t think the answer is to replace the quantitative. I think it’s to supplement it, right? To have those nuggets to have. And this is where you can use your creative design elements and create short videos and narratives of those complementary to the data, the quantitative data, right? They don’t exist in silos. And I’m not here to suggest that we should do one or the other, rather we should join forces of the research methods. Anything we need to add? Are we good? Are we good? Because we’re on this. We’re good. All right. I think we’re good. All right. One more question. Oh, Candice looks like she has. Thank you. Chelsea, this is a question for you. So, well, actually, I wanted to amplify the conversation that we had the other day about the work you’re doing. And my question to you was, I don’t think it’s possible to bridge a divide with the white supremacists. So, if you could expound on that. Yeah. And I want to amplify Liz’s perspective that she wants someone to say like, you don’t have to get everyone to like you. You cannot have a good conversation with someone who denies your humanity. Calling them evil might not help, but I can understand why I would want to do that. But we, there are some cases where this is worth the effort, but when someone strips us of our basic part of being human. Yeah. Yes. All right. We have wrapped this section with several questions answered. Liz feeling happier and better, which is good. So, this is good. So, we’re going to go to one final question for each of you. Another one. So, and we’re going to start with you for this one, Hannah. When we, like I said, we’re going to go back to this notion we started with, how can your research shape hearts and minds? Yeah. So, I think the goal is to use network thinking to identify key players in a group and amplify and magnify there on message behaviors for greater behavior culture change. Great. Thank you. Sure. So, the idea from my research is really getting deeper into the people that you’re trying to serve, amplifying, like you said, their voices through the really deep, rich narratives that they share, understanding the global and the local and how they work together in creating content. Great. Thank you. And Chelsea. Sure. And I think my research can change hearts and minds by listening to other people. You validate them. You can start to have a conversation that doesn’t just completely undermine their perspective. Great. Thank you. All right. So, a couple things before we wrap this up. We’re going to vote. Paper ballots. Have you guys gotten your paper ballots? We have paper ballots. All right. So, there are these two exits out of the theater. Annie and Troy are going to throw their bodies in front of those exits. You will only be allowed to leave if you vote. We put into the ballot box. And because it’s the Frank Show, they are sparkly ballot boxes. So, find these sparkly ballot boxes, drop your ballot in, vote there, and do not, please, please do not leave. So, without doing the voting. So, we want to thank our guests, hearts and minds for everyone. There’s more for all of you. I just don’t have three hands. I hope this. Great. So, thank you all very much. And we’re going to keep moving along.