Jon Krosnick

Jon A. Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University.

Krosnick received a B.A. degree in psychology from Harvard University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2004, Jon Krosnick was professor of psychology and political science at the Ohio State University, where he was a member of the OSU Political Psychology Program and co-directed the OSU Summer Institute in Political Psychology.

Contents

Current Research

Jon Krosnick conducts research in three primary areas: (1) attitude formation, change, and effects, (2) the psychology of political behavior, and (3) the optimal design of questionnaires used for laboratory experiments and surveys, and survey research methodology more generally.

His attitude research has focused primarily on the notion of attitude strength, seeking to differentiate attitudes that are firmly crystallized and powerfully influential of thinking and action from attitudes that are flexible and inconsequential. Many of his studies in this area have focused on the amount of personal importance that an individual chooses to attach to an attitude. Krosnick's studies have illuminated the origins of attitude importance (e.g., material self-interest and values) and the cognitive and behavioral consequences of importance in regulating attitude impact and attitude change processes.

Among the topics explored by Jon Krosnick's political psychology research are: how policy debates affect voters' candidate preferences, media priming and how the news media shape which national problems citizens think are most important for the nation and shape how citizens evaluate the President's job performance, how becoming very knowledgeable about and emotionally invested in a government policy issue (such as abortion or gun control) affects people's political thinking and participation and how people's political views change as they move through the life-cycle from early adulthood to old age. Recently, Krosnick has been studying the effects of ballot order on election outcomes. Findings from his research have verified that people are inclined to select or vote for candidates listed toward the top of the ballot.

His questionnaire design work has illuminated the cognitive and social processes that unfold between researcher and respondent when the latter are asked to answer questions, and his on-going review of 100 years worth of scholarly research on the topic has yielded a set of guidelines for the optimal design of questionnaires to maximize reliability and validity. He has done substantial research on contingent valuation, particularly assessing the impact of anchoring on responses to referendum questions. In social cognition, Krosnick developed a theory of survey satisficing, proposing that the optimal answer to a question involves cognitive work, and that respondents would use satisficing to ease their burden. His recent work in survey methodology has explored the impact of mode of data collection (e.g., face-to-face, telephone, Internet) on response accuracy and the impact of survey response rates on substantive results.

Trivia

In his spare time, Jon Krosnick plays drums with a contemporary jazz group called Charged Particles [1] that has released two CDs internationally and tours across the U.S. and abroad.

Notable Honors

In 1995, Jon Krosnick received the Erik H. Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and Creativity in the Field of Political Psychology from the International Society of Political Psychology. He was appointed fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1996 to 1997. In 1998 Krosnick was elected fellow at the American Psychological Association, the Society for Personal and Social Psychology and at the American Psychological Society. He was appointed University Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC from 2001 to 2007.

Selected publications

Ballot Order

Attitude

Questionnaire Design

Weisberg, H., Krosnick, J. A., & Bowen, B. (1996). Introduction to survey research, polling, and data analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Contingent Valuation

Media Priming

External links