Diana C. Mutz

Diana C. Mutz

Fellow: Awarded 2016
Field of Study: Political Science

Competition: US & Canada

Diana C. Mutz holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication, and also serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research involves the psychology of American attitudes toward globalization. Contrary to conventional wisdom, she finds that personal financial losses and gains play a very minor role in the formation of opinions toward policies such as trade, outsourcing and immigration. Instead, these opinions derive from prospective fears about the impact of globalization, in addition to social psychological predispositions conducive to ingroup favoritism, such as social dominance orientation, ethnocentrism, and competitiveness.

In 2011, Mutz 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 including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics and Political Communication. She is also the author of Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a book awarded the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association, and the 2004 Doris Graber Prize for Most Influential Book on Political Communication published in the last ten years. In 2006, she published Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2006) which was awarded the 2007 Goldsmith Prize by Harvard University and the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association.

Mutz 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. This project received the Warren Mitofsky Innovator Award in 2007. She subsequently wrote Population-Based Survey Experiments (Princeton University Press, 2011), which offers the first book-length treatment of this new method drawing on examples from across the social sciences.

Mutz’s latest book, In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. Her mother believes that Donald Trump must have read it.

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