Jon Krosnick
Encyclopedia
Jon A. Krosnick is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, professor of communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

, political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 and psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

Krosnick received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 degree in psychology from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 and Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 degrees in social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

 from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of 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
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

, where he was a member of the OSU Political Psychology Program and co-directed the OSU Summer Institute in Political Psychology.

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
Attitude (psychology)
An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...

 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
Political psychology
Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field dedicated to understanding political science, politicians and political behavior. Psychological theories of behavior including; belief, motivation, conflict, perception, cognition, information processing, learning strategies, socialization...

 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
Contingent valuation
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination...

, particularly assessing the impact of anchoring on responses to referendum questions. In social cognition
Social cognition
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, in the brain, of information relating to conspecifics, or members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the...

, Krosnick developed a theory of survey satisficing
Satisficing
Satisficing, a portmanteau "combining satisfy with suffice", is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution...

, 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 http://www.chargedparticles.com 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.

Ballot Order

  • Miller, J. M., & Krosnick, J. A. (1998). The impact of candidate name order on election outcomes. Public Opinion Quarterly, 62, 291-330.

Attitude

  • Berent, M. K., & Krosnick, J. A. (1995). The relation between political attitude importance and knowledge structure. In M. Lodge & K. McGraw (Eds.), Political judgment: Structure and process. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Boninger, D. S., Krosnick, J. A., & Berent, M. K. (1995). The origins of attitude importance: Self-interest, social identification, and value-relevance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 68, 61-80.
  • Boninger, D. S., Krosnick, J. A., Berent, M. K., & Fabrigar, L. R. (1995). The causes and consequences of attitude importance. In R. E. Petty and J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Fabrigar, L. R., & Krosnick, J. A. (1995). Attitude importance and the false consensus effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin is a scientific journal published by SAGE Publications for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology...

    , 21, 468-479.
  • Holbrook, A. L., Krosnick, J. A., Visser, P. S., Gardner, W. L., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2001). Attitudes toward presidential candidates and political parties: Initial optimism, inertial first impressions, and a focus on flaws. American Journal of Political Science, 45, 930-950.
  • Holbrook, A. L., Berent, M. K., Krosnick, J. A., Visser, P. S., & Boninger, D. S. (2005). Attitude importance and the accumulation of attitude-relevant knowledge in memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 88, 749-769.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (1988). Attitude importance and attitude change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 240-255.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Schuman, H. (1988). Attitude intensity, importance, and certainty and susceptibility to response effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 54, 940-952.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (1988). The role of attitude importance in social evaluation: A study of policy preferences, presidential candidate evaluations, and voting behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 55, 196-210.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (1989). Attitude importance and attitude accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin is a scientific journal published by SAGE Publications for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology...

    , 15, 297-308.
  • Krosnick, J. A., Boninger, D. S., Chuang, Y. C., Berent, M. K., & Carnot, C. G. (1993). Attitude strength: One construct or many related constructs? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 65, 1132-1149.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Petty, R. E. (1995). Attitude strength: An overview. In R. E. Petty and J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Petty, R. E., & Krosnick, J. A. (Eds.). (1995). Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Rahn, W. M., Krosnick, J. A., & Breuning, M. (1994). Rationalization and derivation processes in survey studies of political candidate evaluation. American Journal of Political Science, 38, 582-600.

Questionnaire Design

  • Holbrook, A. L., Krosnick, J. A., Carson, R. T., & Mitchell, R. C. (2000). Violating conversational conventions disrupts cognitive processing of attitude questions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 465-494.
  • Holbrook, A. L., Green, M. C., & Krosnick, J. A. (2003). Telephone vs. face-to-face interviewing of national probability samples with long questionnaires: Comparisons of respondent satisficing and social desirability response bias. Public Opinion Quarterly, 67, 79-125.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Fabrigar, L. R. (forthcoming). The handbook of questionnaire design. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Alwin, D. F. (1987). An evaluation of a cognitive theory of response order effects in survey measurement. Public Opinion Quarterly, 51, 201-219.
  • Krosnick, J. A., Li, F., & Lehman, D. (1990). Conversational conventions, order of information acquisition, and the effect of base rates and individuating information on social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 59, 1140-1152.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (1991). Response strategies for coping with the cognitive demands of attitude measures in surveys. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5, 213-236.
  • Krosnick, J. A., Narayan, S. S., & Smith, W. R. (1996). Satisficing in surveys: Initial evidence. In M. T. Braverman & J. K. Slater (Eds.), Advances in survey research (pp. 29–44). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Fabrigar, L. R. (1997). Designing rating scales for effective measurement in surveys. In L. Lyberg, P. Biemer, M. Collins, L. Decker, E. DeLeeuw, C. Dippo, N. Schwarz, and D. Trewin (Eds.), Survey Measurement and Process Quality. New York: Wiley-Interscience.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (1999). Survey research. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 537-567.
  • Krosnick, J. A. (2002). The causes of no-opinion responses to attitude measures in surveys: They are rarely what they appear to be. In R. M. Groves, D. A. Dillman, J. L. Eltinge, & R. J. A. Little (Eds.), Survey nonresponse. New York: Wiley.
  • Krosnick, J. A., Holbrook, A. L., Berent, M. K., Carson, R. T., Hanemann, W. M., Kopp, R. J., Mitchell, R. C., Presser, S., Ruud, P. A., Smith, V. K., Moody, W. R., Green, M. C., & Conaway, M. (2002). The impact of “no opinion” response options on data quality: Non-attitude reduction or an invitation to satisfice? Public Opinion Quarterly, 66, 371-403.

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

Contingent Valuation

  • Carson, R. T., Hanemann, W. M., Kopp, R. J., Krosnick, J. A., Mitchell, R. C., Presser, S., Ruud, P. A., & Smith, V. K., with Conaway, M., & Martin, K. (1997). Temporal reliability of estimates from contingent valuation. Land Economics, 73, 151-163.
  • Carson, R. T., Hanemann, W. M., Kopp, R. J., Krosnick, J. A., Mitchell, R. C., Presser, S., Ruud, P. A., & Smith, V. K., with Conaway, M., & Martin, K. (1998). Referendum design and contingent valuation: The NOAA panel’s no-vote recommendation. Review of Economics and Statistics, 80, 335-338.
  • Carson, R. T., Conaway, M. B., Hanemann, W. M., Krosnick, J. A., Mitchell, R. C., Presser, S. (2004). Valuing oil spill prevention: A case study of California's central coast. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Media Priming

  • Iyengar, S., Kinder, D. R., Peters, M. D., & Krosnick, J. A. (1984). The evening news and presidential evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
    The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly psychology journal of the American Psychological Association. It is considered one of the top journals in the fields of social and personality psychology. Its focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical,...

    , 46, 778-787.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Kinder, D. R. (1990). Altering the foundations of support for the president through priming. American Political Science Review, 84, 497-512. Reprinted in John T. Jost and J. Sidanius (Eds.) (2004). Political psychology: Key readings. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
  • Krosnick, J. A., & Brannon, L. A. (1993). The impact of the Gulf War on the ingredients of presidential evaluations: Multidimensional effects of political involvement. American Political Science Review, 87, 963-975.
  • Miller, J. M., & Krosnick, J. A. (1996). News media impact on the ingredients of presidential evaluations: A program of research on the priming hypothesis. In D. Mutz & P. Sniderman (Eds.), Political persuasion and attitude change. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Miller, J. M., & Krosnick, J. A. (1997). The anatomy of news media priming. In S. Iyengar and R. Reeves (Eds.), Do the media govern? Politicians, voters, and reporters in America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Miller, J. M., & Krosnick, J. A. (2000). News media impact on the ingredients of presidential evaluations: Politically knowledgeable citizens are guided by a trusted source. American Journal of Political Science, 44, 301-315.

External links

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