Aired Nov 26, 2025

What if our biggest disagreements aren’t about what we believe—but about what deserves our attention?

In this episode of Outrage Overload, we explore a fascinating new concept in political psychology: issue salience polarization — the idea that we’re not only divided by ideology or values, but by which problems we think deserve our attention in the first place.

Our guests, Adrienne Kafka and Troy Campbell, unpack their groundbreaking research showing how our sense of what matters can shift dramatically depending on the solutions attached to an issue.

Adrienne Kafka is a Ph.D. student in Management and Organizations at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Her research explores how people perceive problems, assign importance to issues, and how these judgments drive polarization in politics and everyday life.

Troy Campbell is a behavioral scientist with a PhD from Duke, former Disney Imagineer and Netflix researcher. He is Chief Scientist at On Your Feet, blending a scientific mind with an artistic heart.

Links

Solution spillover: Pairing issues with ideological solutions fuels polarization (PNAS)