Adam Seth Levine

About

Adam Seth Levine is a SNF Agora Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the science of collaboration in democratic life, exploring when and how people with diverse expertise and experience work together to improve communities. He investigates the role of science in democratic decision-making and the barriers that can hinder collaborative relationships, as well as strategies to overcome these barriers. His work aims to surface and meet unmet desires for civic collaboration, particularly in areas related to public health and social determinants of health, including local public health policy, child and family policy, mental health, aging, bioethics, neuroscience, and more. Prior to his current focus, Levine studied the psychology of persuasion, specifically how political rhetoric can inadvertently demobilize people. His book, 'American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction,' published in 2015, examines this topic through experiments and psychology, and was awarded a Best Book Award by the American Political Science Association. Levine is deeply committed to public engagement, collaborating with nonprofit organizations across multiple countries to design and conduct research. He is also the president and co-founder of research4impact, a nonprofit organization that fosters collaborative relationships between researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, helping to create over 350 new collaborations.…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Nursing
• Criminology
• Virology

Selected publications

• Personalizing Moral Reframing in Interpersonal Conversation: A Field Experiment

  The Journal of Politics · 2021 · 37 citations

  Organizations in the contemporary United States face substantial challenges with persuading citizens and moving them to take action. Prior research finds that citizens’ views can be changed and strengthened using frames consistent with their moral values. However, it can be difficult for organizations to tailor their appeals to individuals’ moral values given the difficulty in predicting which moral values matter to which citizens. We present a preregistered field experiment in which canvassers…

  PublisherDOI

• US Adults’ Beliefs About Harassing or Threatening Public Health Officials During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  JAMA Network Open · 2022 · 25 citations

  Importance: The rise in attacks on public health officials has weakened the public health workforce and complicated COVID-19 mitigation efforts. Objective: To examine the share of US adults who believed harassing or threatening public health officials because of COVID-19 business closures was justified and the factors shaping those beliefs. Design, Setting, and Participants: The Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Civic Life and Public Health Survey was fielded from November 11 to 30, 2020, and Ju…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• American Trust in Science & Institutions in the Time of COVID-19

  Daedalus · 2022-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic prompted many discussions about how people's trust in science shaped our ability to address the crisis. Early in the pandemic, our research team set out to understand how trust in science relates to support for public health guidelines, and to identify some trusted sources of science. In this essay, we share our findings and offer ideas about what might be done to strengthen the public's trust in science. Notably, our research shows a stark partisan divide: Republi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Civic engagement and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic

  BMC Public Health · 2022-05-02 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: To examine the relationship between civic association participation and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly whether different forms of engagement mitigate the increased rates of psychological distress throughout 2020. METHODS: Panel survey data collected from a nationally representative cohort of 1222 U.S. adults. Data was collected in three waves in April, July, and November 2020. Psychological distress was measured using the validated Kessler-6 instrum…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward a Safer World by 2040

  JAMA · 2025-11-03 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Importance: Since the start of the 21st century, more than 800 000 firearm deaths and more than 2 million firearm injuries have occurred in the US. All categories of firearm violence-homicide, suicide, unintentional-result in reverberating harms to individuals, families, communities, and society. The collective responsibility of society is to safeguard the health and safety of its members, including from firearm harms. The JAMA Summit on Firearm Violence convened 60 thought leaders from a wide a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nelly Joseph‐Mathurin

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  49 shared

• Om V. Singh

  Johns Hopkins University

  49 shared

• Kenneth Aldape

  National Institutes of Health

  49 shared

• Richard L. Huganir

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  49 shared

• Mohit Rana

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  49 shared

• William R. Bell

  Boston University

  49 shared

• Randall J. Bateman

  Washington University in St. Louis

  49 shared

• Yoshiko Nakano

  University of Tokyo Hospital

  49 shared

Awards & honors

• E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation on Ame…
• 2016 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Ass…

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard S. Katzh-44
• Daniel Deudneyh-27
• T Smithh-26