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.

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 [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.

elected Publications

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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 55, 196-210.
*Krosnick, J. A. (1989). Attitude importance and attitude accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 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, 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, 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, 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 J 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

* [http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/Krosnick/KrosnickCV.doc Curriculum Vitae]