MIAMI—Two more leading business thinkers and authors have joined the speaker lineup for the 2013 Global Public Relations Summit. Social psychologist and University of North Carolina professor Melanie Green and blogger and You Are Not So Smart author David McRaney will be part of panel convened by Ogilvy Public Relations and moderated by the firm’s global chief executive Chris Graves.

The two join other leading thinkers and writers including Steven Berlin Johnson (Future Perfect and Where Good Ideas Come From); Douglas Rushkoff (Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now); and Randi Zuckerberg (CEO/founder of Zuckerberg Media and editor-in-chief of community site Dot Complicated).

“Public relations pioneer Edward L Bernays described PR as an ‘applied social science,’ and what we are seeing in the social media age is just how much our industry still has to learn from new developments in the social sciences,” says Paul Holmes, editor of The Holmes Report and chair of the Global Summit. “The Summit will pull together several thinkers from outside the PR industry whose thinking will help professionals understand how people process information and how communication can truly influence behavior.”

Green is a social psychologist whose research has focused on the power of narrative to change beliefs, including the effects of fictional stories on real-world attitudes. Her theory of "transportation into a narrative world" focuses on immersion into a story as a mechanism of narrative influence. She has edited two books on these topics, Narrative Impact and Persuasion: Psychological Insights and Perspectives.

Green has also investigated the influence of technology (in particular, television and the Internet) on social capital, and the ways in which trust can develop in online relationships.

McRaney cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South, and later covered a variety of topics, from who tests rockets for NASA, to what it is like to run a halfway home for HIV-positive homeless men, to how a family sent their kids to college by making and selling knives.

He has been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, public speaker, and tornado survivor. His book, You Are Not So Smart, is “about all the wonderful ways you delude yourself every day.”

Attendees can register for the Global Public Relations Summit at our dedicated microsite.