Princeton Research in Experimental Social Science (PRESS)

PRESS Research Workshop

Experiments in International Opinion

Diana Mutz

Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication

 Director, Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics

University of Pennsylvania

Professor Mutz will describe two experimental designs testing theories about how people form opinions about other countries. She uses these experiments to illustrate some under-utilized, yet beneficial, practices in experimental social science that can lead to more accurate interpretations of experimental results.

Audience: Princeton students, faculty, and fellows interested in experimental research design in the social sciences

Diana C. Mutz, Ph.D. Stanford University, does research on public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with a particular emphasis on political communication. In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, she received the Lifetime Career Achievement Award in Political Communication from the American Political Science Association. She was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.

Mutz has published articles in a variety of academic journals and is the author of several award-winning books, including: Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2006); In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media (Princeton University Press, 2015); and Winners and Losers: The Psychology of Foreign Trade (Princeton University Press).

Mutz also served as founding co-PI of Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), an interdisciplinary infrastructure project that continues to promote methodological innovation across the social sciences (see www.tessexperiments.org). She subsequently wrote Population-Based Survey Experiments (Princeton University Press, 2011) which offers the first book-length treatment of this method drawing examples from across the social sciences.