Arthur Lupia

Arthur Lupia studies decision making and learning. He uses this information to explain to convey complex ideas to diverse audiences. His work clarifies how information and institutions affect policy and politics and how people make decisions when they lack information.  He draws from multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines and uses multiple research methods. His topics of expertise include information processing, persuasion, strategic communication, and civic competence. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine's Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity and Trust.

 

He works with many groups to improve decision-making and the communication of scientific facts. From 2018-2022, he served as an Assistant Director of the (US) National Science Foundation. In that role, he led NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, designing and implementing a restructuring that increased the portfolio's political support and public value. From 2019-2021, he served as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Subcommittee on Open Science. In that role, he helped over 30 federal agencies design and implement improved practices for making products of federally-funded research more widely available.

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Prior to joining NSF, he was Chair of the National Research Council’s Roundtable on the Application of Social and Behavioral Science Research. He served on the boards of organizations dedicated to increasing the social value of scientific research including the Center for Open Science, the National Academies' Advisory Board on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Leshner Leadership Institute. He has served as Chair of the AAAS Section on Social, Economic, and Political Sciences, President of the Midwest Political Science Association, and a range of leadership positions at the American Political Science Association including Treasurer and Chair of the Task Force on Public Engagement. 

 

Dr. Lupia also has developed new means for researchers to better serve science and society.  As a founder of TESS (Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences), he has helped hundreds of scientists from many disciplines run innovative experiments on opinion formation and change using nationally representative subject pools.  As a Principal Investigator of the American National Election Studies, he brought many methodological innovations to the study that increased its usefulness and credibility. He helped to design the EITM Summer Institutes and currently serves as its lead PI.

 

He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and is one of the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows. His awards include the American Political Science Association's Ithiel de Sola Pool Award, the American Association for Public Opinion Research's Mitovsky Innovator's Award, and the National Academy of Sciences' Initiatives in Research Award.

 

His articles appear in political science, economics, and law journals, and his editorials are published in leading newspapers. His research has been supported by a wide range of groups including the World Bank, the Public Policy Institute of California, the Markle Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. In 2016, Oxford University Press released his latest book, Uninformed: Why People Know So Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It.