Diana Mutz - (ZOOM ONLY) Winners and Losers: The Psychology of Foreign Trade
Winners and Losers challenges conventional wisdom about how American citizens form opinions on international trade. While dominant explanations in economics emphasize whether individuals gain or lose financially as a result of trade—this book takes a psychological approach, demonstrating how people view the complex world of international trade through the lens of interpersonal relations. Drawing on psychological theories of preference formation as well as original surveys and experiments, Diana Mutz finds that in contrast to the economic view of trade as cooperation for mutual benefit, many Americans view trade as a competition between the United States and other countries—a contest of us versus them. These people favor trade as long as they see Americans as the “winners” in these interactions, viewing trade as a way to establish dominance over foreign competitors. For others, trade is a means of maintaining more peaceful relations between countries. Just as individuals may exchange gifts to cement relationships, international trade is a tie that binds nations together in trust and cooperation. Winners and Losers reveals how people’s orientations toward in-groups and out-groups play a central role in influencing how they think about trade with foreign countries, and shows how a better understanding of the psychological underpinnings of public opinion can lead to lasting economic and societal benefits.
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. At Penn she 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.
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 including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics and Journal of 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, the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association, and the American Association for Public Opinion Research Book Award in 2019.
In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. It received the Best Book Award from the International Society for Political Psychology, in 2016 and the Doris Graber Prize by 2017 APSA Political Communication section.
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). Mutz and co-PI Skip Lupia received the Warren Mitofsky Innovators Award in 2007 for creating and implementing this ongoing project. 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.
Her latest book is out in summer 2021 and is entitled Winners and Losers: The Psychology of Foreign Trade (Princeton University Press).
Before coming to Penn, Professor Mutz taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ohio State University.