Krosnick has served as a consultant for government agencies, universities, and businesses, has testified as an expert in court proceedings, and has been an on-air television commentator on election night.
[2] He has conducted research on American attitudes toward global warming, how negativity in campaigns affects turnout, ballot order effects and other topics.
[3] Krosnick's mother was an educator and opera-singer, and his father was a physician[4][5][6] who was a diabetes specialist, professor, expert witness, and researcher.[7].
In his article, Optimizing Survey Questionnaire Design in Political Science: Insights from Psychology, Krosnick also says that respondents who truly are completely unfamiliar with the topic of a question will say so when probed, and that answer can be accepted at that time, thus avoiding collecting measurements of non‐existent "opinions."
Since face-to-face interviews are costly, Krosnick conducted a study providing computers and an Internet connection to a set of randomly sampled people, and inviting them to answer survey questions online over a year.
[16] Krosnick and Yeager used the same procedure to weight the raw data demographically in order for their surveys to be equally representative in terms of gender, age, race, etc.
Krosnick reached similar conclusions using two surveys collected for the U.S. Census Bureau, with one being a traditional poll and the other an Internet opt-in one.
[18] Krosnick and a colleague, analyzing data from an Ohio election, concluded the candidate whose name is listed first on a ballot received roughly 2% votes more in half of the races they studied.
[22] For elections, Krosnick hypothesized the effect may be from voters, feeling compelled to cast a vote, choosing the first choice on the list.
[25] In the survey, conducted online, respondents were shown a picture of a black, Hispanic, or white male before a neutral image.
[30] Krosnick later traveled to Washington to present studies on voting psychology at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
The resulting analysis of voter turnout was a part of a larger study that involved NES data from seven presidential elections and more than 25,000 respondents.
[31] The studies also indicated that mudslinging in political campaigns effectively increased voter turnout, provided that candidates vilified their opponents tastefully without tarnishing their own image.
[32] In 2010 and 2012, Krosnick conducted national surveys to explore American's understanding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
"[36] The research team concluded that if everyone in America knew enough to answer all the questions correctly, the approval rating of Obamacare would rise from 32% to 70%.
[35] Krosnick has both conducted surveys and analyzed previous ones on global warming, some as part of his work at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment.
His survey found, in 2007, that most Americans accepted global warming, but by a two-thirds majority were not convinced significant efforts were needed to stop it.
Krosnick considered the media providing equal coverage to both sides of the debate, not in proportion to how strongly the views were represented among experts, a prime reason for the public's disbelieving scientists were united on the issue.
He has also analyzed a 2006 poll by ABC News, TIME and Stanford, which showed the public has grown more concerned about global warming over the previous decade, with more than two thirds believing in unsettled weather patterns caused by human activity.
Krosnick, who has run polls on public attitudes towards global warming since 2006, conducted a 2010 survey among 1000 Americans with the same questions as previous years in addition to new inquiries about recent and relevant controversies.
[citation needed] His surveys also have indicated that 85% of Americans accept the idea of global warming and endorse steps to address it, even if higher costs are necessary to do so.
Krosnick also authored a study that revealed a subset of voters that focus in on a single issue that could be compelled to turn out if candidates appeal to them on climate change.
[50] Krosnick has also researched attitude strength, which per him is a subjective element,[51] with one possible measure being the attachment to a topic a respondent expresses in a self-report survey.
[59] The program was created in response to the goal set by the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security in 1996 to reduce the risk of air travel accidents by 80 percent over the next 10 years.
[64] The project implemented a survey with an 80 percent response rate, interviewing a random sample of pilots about safety incidents.
To some observers, preliminary findings suggested that some safety-related problems were occurring at astonishingly high rates, in some cases as much as four times the number previously reported by the FAA.
"[70][71] Significant criticism from the public over NASA's refusal to release the data and its handling of NAOMS prompted Congress to launch an investigation into the matter.
[74] The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) sent a letter to Congressman Bart Gordon, then chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology stating, “there was no valid scientific basis for the Administrator's technical criticism of the NAOMS project.”[74] In a National Academy of Sciences 2004 report, NAS officially recommended “NASA should combine NAOMS methodology and resources with the ASRS program data to identify aviation safety trends.
For instance, he was hired by the attorney general of Oklahoma in a case against Tyson Foods, in which they were accused of polluting the Illinois Water Shed.
The Summer Institute in Political Psychology began as an annual tradition at Ohio State University in 1991 under the direction of Margaret Hermann.