ICA Presents. Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella, and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Joseph Cappella. Joe Cappella is the Gerald R. Miller Emeritus Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has resulted in more than 200 articles and book chapters and four co-authored books in areas of health and political communication, social interaction, nonverbal behavior, media effects, and statistical methods. These works have been cited more than 20,000 times according to Google Scholar. He served as editor of Human Communication Research and was co-editor on six special issues of six different journals. He served on the editorial boards of 20 different journals and directed 51 doctoral dissertations. He is a fellow of the International Communication Association and its past president. He's a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and recipient of the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award. His book with Kathleen Hall Jamieson entitled Spiral of Cynicism has been awarded the Doris Graber Book Award from the American Political Science Association and the Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association. Today, Joe is going to be in conversation with Robin Nabi. Robin Nabi is a Professor of Communication at the University of California in Santa Barbara. And here is Robin.
Hi, I'm Robin Nabi, and today it's my genuine honor to be interviewing Professor Joseph Capella. Joe is truly one of the giants in our discipline, with significant achievements across his expansive academic career. Joe and I first met nearly 30 years ago when I was a very nervous first-year MA student in his social psychology of communication course at Annenberg. And after years of being in the hot seat having to answer his questions, I am thrilled to turn the tables. So with that, hello, Joe. I'm really honored to have this conversation with you.
Thank you, Robin. Thank you so much for being willing to do this interview, and I really look forward to the opportunity to chat with you.
Okay, I want to start at the beginning. So I've always been fascinated by people's stories. And I was hoping you could tell us something about yours, maybe something about your family and your upbringing.
Sure, just a little bit on that– I'm really first generation and a half from Italian heritage. My father was born in Italy and came to the United States in the 1920s with one of the big Italian immigrations. My mother's parents were born in Italy, but she was born in the United States. The thing to say about the family that is of most relevance here has to do with the fact that neither of my parents was well educated. My mother did not finish high school and my father had basically just some local training in Italy from the local priest. But education was a really high priority for both of my parents, but certainly for my father. And so as it turned out, I was one of the very first people in our family and in my generation to go on to college, although some of my cousins did so as well at about the same time. But there wasn't a strong higher education experience in our family. But there was a lot of valuing of education for sure.
I’m curious, did that make it hard for you to transition into college?
Well, in some senses, I was always a very good student. So I wouldn't say that I struggled at the beginning. But probably the biggest challenges for me were communicating clearly in written and spoken form. But I loved college. And I loved that we dealt with all kinds of interesting ideas, both in formal ways and in informal ways. And probably the other big challenge for me, despite having an interest in the hard sciences, was that math was tough for me. I mastered it more or less over the course of my college career and mastered it reasonably well. But those those were the challenges.
So is that how you decided to go to graduate school, you thought, I want more of this?
Well, as I moved on in college, I basically said to myself, yes, I love the educational life. I want to be really good at what I do and not just good. And so graduate school was basically a foregone conclusion. And I had wonderful mentors in my physics training. In those days, in a Catholic college, the guiding voice on that floor was the chairman of the physics department. And I was the resident advisor on that floor, and I was in his room many nights, because he would sit there with his room door open. And we'd have the opportunity to chit chat about all kinds of things in life but also in physics and so on. And then I had a good mentor who got his Ph.D. in physics at Johns Hopkins. And he strongly encouraged me to go on to graduate study. And I followed him to Johns Hopkins for one year, anyway, of graduate training in physics.
I'm really curious how you ended up in communication, from someone who struggled with communication, written and verbal, and now you're in communication.
The short answer to that is that it was two things. It was Claude Shannon's information theory and the woman to whom I am now married, Elena. She was a math major. We were undergraduates together. I was a physics major. And senior year, she took a course from somebody in the sociology department there who really got suddenly interested in communications, and in particular, information theory, but didn't understand the mathematics of information theory. So he invited her to write a paper that would explain it to him from a mathematical point of view. Elena got interested in applying to communication programs around the country and did so. I went off to Johns Hopkins, and so we went our separate ways after graduation. And so this Brooklyn girl went to Michigan State in communications. And we then rekindled our relationship in letter form over the ensuing year. And she was telling me about all these great and fun, wonderful things, and interesting ideas that were being formulated at the time, and a really innovative curriculum as well. As a result of that I went to visit a couple of times, and the people at Michigan State welcomed me with open arms into their seminars. So here I was, and as a result, we got back together and I applied to the program at Michigan State. And that's how I got into communications.
That's really sweet. So I’m curious, was there a problem you wanted to solve or questions you wanted to answer?
This was a time in which the issues in the United States were heavily attached to social concerns about race and racism and discrimination, but also the war in Vietnam. And scientists were implicated in some ways, in negative ways, in the pursuit of the war in Vietnam. And so in some ways, they had kind of a bad moral tinge to them. And I thought that if there was any place where there would be any chance of solving these kinds of problems, it would be in the communication domain, though I had no idea how I could possibly contribute to any of that at the time that I entered graduate school. It was much more along the lines of, I'm going to go here and study about these interesting questions and see where they see where they lead.
So I'm thinking about the work that you've done over your career. Where has your contribution been? Like when you look back on your career, which is still going, I'm just wondering what you see as the significant contributions.
When I look back and say, you know, what are the things that I'm most proud of, it's all around messaging and messages, whether it's in the interpersonal domain, in the nonverbal side of things, or in the textual side of side of things in the work that I did in social interaction and in interpersonal communication in the early parts of my career. And whether it was political research that I did with Kathleen, mostly having to do with different kinds of policy-based, and issue-based, and strategically-based messaging and its impacts on civic involvement and political involvement, and, of course, cynicism. And then most recently, specifically the messages associated with the persuasive processes that we see in yes, both political, but heavily now for the last 15 or 20 years, in the health domain. And when I look back at some of the papers that still get citations, some of the early papers on contagion, and both the theoretical ones and the empirical ones, I think those papers have been important in the minds of researchers because they've had some staying power, some shelf life, so to speak, which I think is an important characteristic of any of our work. We hope that that the things that we do don't just sit on the shelf for the weekend and then get shoved off, but that they have some staying power.
What gives something shelf life and staying power? Like how do we do work that matters?
I certainly don't have a recipe for that because sometimes it’s timeliness and comprehensiveness. So for example, an article that we wrote with Matt Kreuter and a bunch of people from NCI came out of a project on narratives. That article has a huge number of citations. And it came out before there was a glut of other work that was being done on narrative. And it had a comprehensiveness to it that allowed a lot of people to be able to cite it, and use it, because it covered a lot of ground and it reached out to an audience much larger than just a communication research and communication theory audience, but to a health audience as well, and a cancer audience in particular. I think the same is true, to some extent, on the book that Kathleen and I did on Spiral of Cynicism. There was a lot of interest in the way in which cynicism had arisen in the United States in that time, and the lack of social trust, and so on, which seems almost quaint now by today's standards. But at the time, it was receiving a lot of attention. And so we wrote about something that was just below the surface in a lot of work in politics, and sociology, and in communication. And so as a result, I think what happened was it became a touchstone for a lot of people, and they were able to find something in that set of concerns, sometimes theoretical, sometimes empirical, that resonate with them in the research that they were doing. And that is the most widely cited thing I've ever done by a longshot.
As you were talking I was thinking about just that issue of timing. Maybe 10 years ago it was too early, and in 10 years it's too late. And just so finding that moment– which is why I was thinking, when I asked you earlier about, so what problem do you want to solve? Because it seems like scholars today might be socialized more to be thinking about solving problems. How do we do that well? Because we might be very good at developing theory, and testing theory, and designing studies, and publishing it within our own world. But then it really seems to matter most if we can cross that threshold and have stakeholders hear what we have to say. And it seems like that's a struggle. How do you think those of us in this discipline can do the work that is relevant to the real world and have it matter?
I think it's a struggle. It's a constant struggle, because I think people need to do research on topics that they care about. Because we all know that the research process, and the writing process, and the publication process is a strain. It is stressful. It takes energy, it takes money, it takes good students to help you, and staff, and supportive individuals. And that means getting outside of yourself, getting to your collaborators that are working in the same or allied areas, and the search, I will say, for financial support, that can help you make progress on the particular problems that you're interested in making progress on. So it's, to start with, I think, the big questions, and to take those big questions, and to try to move them in a direction that makes those big questions doable, but in a way that is consequential, almost no matter how the research works out. For example, one of the topics that that interests me and has for several years, and now more than ever, is the topic of siloing. And people are driven to avoid other points of view, and other people, and other political ideologies and information that is at odds with their worldview. How do we get ourselves out of our own silos? And how do we get others out of their silos so that we have some opportunity for informational exchanges that are something other than battles, and conflicts, and name calling, and trolling? That's a huge problem. No research project, no researcher is going to solve that problem. It's going to take a lot of people working on that problem. But it means that if you start with that big problem, you know that the answer to that, no matter what the answer is, is a contribution of consequence. And in the end, I think we want to be able to say to ourselves and to the people who have supported us, whether they are our personal supports, or they are our institutional supports, or our funding supports, guess what? I'm asking and seeking answers to a question that matters, regardless of what that answer is, including having no good answer. And so constantly telling yourself and pushing yourself to look for those kinds of questions, and then taking the next step or steps to bring together the kinds of expertise, kinds of support that it would take to make some progress on that.
I love how you link together the societal problem with the intellectual problem. So we have our problem of siloing, and partisanship, and selective exposure as an issue, but also how we build these collaborations. How do you build thoses collaborations? You've been very successful with that in your career in multiple domains. If you're going to solve big societal problems, you need multiple perspectives, and pull people together with different skill sets to really address it well. But it can be a challenge to do that. So how do you get into that arena and make some things happen?
So I will say that early in my career, I was not very successful at doing that. People sometimes from these disciplines think that communication people are cute, rather than important, and significant, and consequential. I have never found that among the hard scientists, and public health people, and the people out of medicine and other of the disciplines that are outside of the standard sort of social sciences. The hard scientists who have other kinds of expertise, those are the people that I have thrived with in terms of collaborations. As long as they respect you, which again, in much of my experience they have, then the collaborations are easier. But if there isn't the foundation of respect, I don't think that the collaborations can come as readily. They haven't as readily.
You’ve been part of this discipline for a long time and a leader of ICA. How can we as a discipline get a seat at the table?
I've had people ask me this question, how do you get your communications research supported by this or that group? I said, I don't talk about doing communications research. I say that if we're talking to the National Cancer Institute, we talk about reducing the cancer burden. If we're talking to the FDA, we're talking about reduction in the harm associated with increase in the use of nicotine through vaping. And so it's that behavior that any of these entities care about.
Part of what I was thinking earlier about– well, there's a seat at the table with other academics to do the research, and then there's a seat at the table with decisionmakers. There have been a few in our discipline who have been able to have that kind of influence. And I think Kathleen Jamieson is one. How do we do that as individuals? Does ICA have some role in trying to make those connections?
I think that ICA has become so much more internationalized. And what constitutes, you know, a place at the table in country X is very different from what it is in country Y. So I'm not saying what about the possibility of ICA doing anything more than creating the kinds of opportunities at our meetings for people who have those kinds of policy experiences and knowledge to help share that in a kind of mentoring way, so to speak, with the rest of the membership. That’s very different from the organization developing its tools and so on for policy-related deliberations. I think that would be very difficult to be acceptable across the wide, broad international sphere.
So if we think about what the big intellectual questions are that we should be asking now– and we can, perhaps, develop ideas from what we see in that landscape, and then some theory can develop from there. But I'm wondering, where should a young scholar be now? They've got their career in front of them. Or even someone who's mid-career or later career who says, I want to be on the pulse– where's the pulse right now, in your view?
A lot of guesswork here, but there are topics that interest me and that I think are ones that are ripe for the sophisticates. And so one is this question of moving from bag of words approaches to text analysis that is pretty common right now and useful in its own way, to propositional structures that tell us something about the kinds of claims that are being made, so that dog bites man, man bites dog are two different things. They are not the same thing. Even though they have the same words in sequence, they produce different kinds of claims. So I think there's a big methodological issue in there. But that's also a theoretical issue about how the structuring of terminology will alter the nature of the findings that we have and can glean from social media.
I feel like we've had decades of looking at some of these questions, and that how far have we really gotten, in part because what's happening in the lab is not what's happening in the real world. And so whatever we see when we put a message in front of someone is not necessarily what's going to happen when they're with their friend looking at something on their phone and then distracted. And so trying to understand what people do with these messages in their lives in a real world context, it sometimes to me feels like apples and oranges. Can we really generalize it, especially in this media age?
In this age of social media, misinformation, segmentation of media, and so on and so on, what we have is a problem of tracing opinions and the movement of information through social systems that seems virtually intractable. But if you really want to understand how opinion forms, how it moves, how it changes, you've got to take into account all of these things– the selective exposure, the selective avoidance, the media biases, the media segmentation, the kinds of false information that can push things in directions that are exactly the opposite of what the accurate information is. And it's that kind of opinion dynamics, which has always been there, but now it is there in such a complicated way– that understanding, for example, how campaigns work is a much more difficult problem than it ever has been.
You mentioned misinformation and the partisan divides. There's health challenges. Do you see other social issues in the world where you say, this is where communication scholars, if you're interested, this would be a great place to expend your energy?
Well, I think probably one of the most obvious ones right now is propaganda versus persuasion and the role of misinformation. And not only is that on the minds of a huge number of people from many, many disciplines, it's also very much on the mind of the Surgeon General of the United States. And he has been working to try to use the bully pulpit to encourage research on misinformation. I think the Annenberg Public Policy Center has done yeoman's duty on misinformation and always has. But I think that it's a fundamental problem in politics and increasingly, of course, in health, and in other kinds of areas of social consequence, whether we're talking about racism, or gender, or sexual identity, whatever the case may be, the presence of misinformation.
So as we think about moving forward, since this series is on architects, what should we be building? As we stand on the shoulders of giants like you and others in the discipline, as the earlier career scholars are trying to build blocks on to, what would you say would be the most important?
I do think that people ought to be saying to themselves, basically on a daily basis as they think about their own career choices and stuff, study what you want to study. But make sure that during the day you can say to yourself, I got up, and I did the things that I wanted to do, and it mattered. It mattered to the society. It mattered to people. And I can take what I have learned, and I can somehow communicate it, not just to the people who know me and my peers, but to others, to the society at large, to policymakers, to others, as well. And so that at the end of the day, I can say to myself, I produced something that mattered. It therefore has at least a chance of having some good shelf life.
Those are really inspiring words, Joe. I really want to thank you for this conversation. It honestly is just such an honor and a pleasure to spend time with you. On behalf of all of your students and the scholars you've influenced both directly and indirectly through your work, I want to thank you for all you've done for us and for the discipline.
Well, thank you for doing this interview. And thank you for being one of the former Cappella students. I've been blessed to have students like you and others. And it's been one of the great joys of my life to have worked with people like you, and so many of you. That's a great honor and one that I will carry with me forever. Thank you.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Jacqueline Colarusso and Kate In. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
