Robb Willer (born 1977) is an American sociologist and social psychologist known for his work on political persuasion, polarization, democracy, and morality. He is a professor of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior at Stanford University where he is the Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and Faculty Co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Biography
Willer grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and Columbia, South Carolina. He earned his B.A. in sociology from the University of Iowa and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology at Cornell University. During graduate school, he also worked as a union organizer for the United Auto Workers.
Research
Robb Willer has published more than 70 scientific articles in sociology, psychology, political science, organizations, and general science journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Administrative Science Quarterly. As of March 21, 2023, his Google Scholar h-index was 50 and his i10-index was 77, with 18,064 citations.
Much of Willer’s research focuses on leveraging social and behavioral science for positive social impact. He co-organized (with Jay van Bavel) a many-authored paper published early in the COVID-19 pandemic on how to leverage social and behavioral science to intervene effectively to address the pandemic, and subsequently conducting research on effectively promoting vaccinations.
Additionally, Willer is a co-leader of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a “megastudy” that experimentally tested 25 crowdsourced interventions designed to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes.
He and Matthew Feinberg developed the idea of "moral reframing". Based on moral foundations theory, moral reframing is a technique of political persuasion in which a political message draws a connection between a given issue and the audience's assumed moral values. Willer's talk on political communication has been viewed over 2.9 million times since it was posted on the TED website January 20, 2017.
Willer's other research on politics emphasizes the effects of various forms of threat and anxiety on political attitudes, for example, the effects of racial status threats, terror threats, and masculinity threats. He has studied masculine overcompensation, showing that men whose masculinity has been threatened tend to adopt more stereotypically masculine attitudes on issues like war and gay rights.
He contributed research to the book Modern Romance: An Investigation, by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg.
Teaching
Prior to moving Stanford, Willer was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's Sociology Department. Willer was the 2009 recipient of the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Selected publications
Willer, R., Kuwabara, K., & Macy, M. W. (2009). The false enforcement of unpopular norms. American Journal of Sociology, 115(2), 451-490. Willer, R. (2009). Groups reward individual sacrifice: The status solution to the collective action problem. American Sociological Review, 74(1), 23-43. Willer, R., Rogalin, C. L., Conlon, B., & Wojnowicz, M. T. (2013). Overdoing gender: A test of the masculine overcompensation thesis. American journal of sociology, 118(4), 980-1022 Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2013). The moral roots of environmental attitudes. Psychological Science, 24(1), 56-62. Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2015). From gulf to bridge: When do moral arguments facilitate political influence?. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1665-1681. Bavel, J. J. V., Baicker, K., Boggio, P. S., Capraro, V., Cichocka, A., Cikara, M., ... & Willer, R. (2020). Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response. Nature human behaviour, 4(5), 460-471. Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements. Journal of personality and social psychology, 119(5), 1086. Voelkel, J. G., Stagnaro, M.N., Chu, J., Pink, S., Mernyk, J., Redekopp, C., Cashman, M., Druckman, J., Rand, D., & Willer, R. (Working Paper). Megastudy identifying successful interventions to strengthen Americans' democratic attitudes.