The Big (Bad?) Wolf with Dr. Alex Metcalf

This week’s guest is Dr. Alex Metcalf, associate professor at the University of Montana’s Franke College of Forestry and Conservation. Alex is a social scientist who studies how people make decisions in a wide variety of conservation domains. Alex and Justin collaborate on a variety of projects, including a just released study on the interaction between politics and our attitudes towards wolves. In this conversation, Alex and Justin talk about how political identity can contribute to the polarization around people’s attitudes towards wolves and discuss how identity-based assumptions can drive division, but also how that can be corrected to bring people back together.